For seven years, I led the Boiler Room, a house of prayer missions base in downtown Greenville, North Carolina. It was launched supernaturally in 2009, and you can read more about how it all started here. Our quaint prayer room was special. On average, we had around 20-25 hours per week of corporate worship and prayer happening there. We had weekly worship gatherings, monthly Burns, internships, prayer schools and special events. We did anything we could to try our best to build day & night worship & prayer. It was an exhausting and glorious seven year window, during which my amazing wife also gave birth to all four of our children.
Without any formal training or previous experience staffing a house of prayer, I leaned hard on God and sought counsel on how to best lead the Boiler Room. I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned a lot too. As I reflect on that seven years, I wanted to share seven things I learned about prayer during that time.
1. Prayer Takes God
Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it. Psalm 127:1
You would think that a prayer ministry would understand its dependency upon God. Yet I somehow managed, time and time again, to try to build a house of prayer in my own strength and with my own efforts.
“Build prayer with prayer.” This was advice given to me by an older prayer leader a few years after the Boiler Room launched. I came back to this wisdom again and again.
By inviting us to build a house of prayer, God was taking us on a journey of discovering the power of prayer. The truth is that no ministry effort is built or sustained except by prayerful dependence on God, whether it be a local church, missions work or even a prayer ministry. It took lots of striving and wasted energy before I realized John Wesley was right when he said “God does nothing except in response to believing prayer.”
2. Prayer Takes Labor
I learned that God builds the house. I also learned that there is healthy labor that is in partnership with God. Not all labor is in vain. A prayerful dependence on God does not mean that we disengage. It means that we shift our engagement to God himself, and allow our effort to be an overflow of our relationship with Him.
“For we are laborers together with God….” I Corinthians 3:9
Any fruitful Christian or leader who is impacting the world is a hard worker. The book of Proverbs is full of rebukes for those who are slothful and lazy. Do not think I am suggesting that you overload your schedule, get too busy for your family or skip the Sabbath. I am saying that you need to take responsibility, humble yourself, and work with all your might for six days a week. God made us to work with Him, and leading prayer is a lot of work!
3. Prayer Has Gone Viral
For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. Isaiah 56:7
As I shared in my recent blog series on the prayer movement, day & night prayer is multiplying throughout the earth at a historic pace. Much of what I learned about the prayer movement I discovered while leading the Boiler Room.
Realizing that God was orchestrating prayer was a constant encouragement to me. I was not trying to build a house of prayer by myself in eastern North Carolina. I was joining in with a worldwide movement that was being led by the Holy Spirit.
When we needed people to help serve at the Boiler Room, I knew that God would provide because He was already drawing a generation into this. He was already stirring worship leaders to minister to Him. He was already awakening His Church to cry out in intercession.
4. Prayer Can Be Fun
Even them I will bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My house of prayer. Isaiah 56:7
Depending on your experience in prayer, if you found out that God was commissioning you to spend 20+ hours each week in a prayer room, you might either be excited or terrified. As a full-time prayer missionary and director at the Boiler Room, I was locked in to this kind of prayer schedule for seven years.
One thing that was vital in keeping me sane was learning to enjoy prayer. And learning to enjoy prayer really meant learning to enjoy God. One thing that helped tremendously was praying in the spirit of the tabernacle of David. This meant rooting my prayer in intimacy with Jesus and musical worship. I was not in a prayer room to wrestle with God and get Him to do my will. I was there to enjoy God, discover His heart and pray His will.
I found that prayer actually could be enjoyable, even while doing it for four or more hours each day!
5. Prayer Can Be Hard
And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. Luke 22:44
Jesus’ prayer meeting in the garden of Gethsemane seemed pretty rough. I mean… he started sweating blood.
Prayer was never quite that hard at the Boiler Room. However, we had our fair share of challenges. I had a lot of experience in discovering the seven ways to ruin a prayer meeting.
Sometimes I was just tired. Sometimes my heart had grown hard through sin or doubt or fear. Sometimes it took a while to get through that stuff and enjoy God again. Sometimes I was having a fine day, but I just didn’t really sense God’s presence. Sometimes I opened the Bible and it felt dull. Sometimes I was distracted and could not seem to focus no matter what.
Sometimes prayer is hard.
6. Prayer Works
“And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” Matthew 21:22
When you lead a citywide prayer ministry, you realize that you will never know firsthand the answer to much of your intercession. However, over the course of seven years, God gave us so many clear answers.
- The crime rates in Greenville starting dropping the year the Boiler Room opened and continued on a downward trend.
- After a few years of praying for unity in the Church, a few of the pastors in the city started meeting together privately for lunch. Now dozens of pastors gather together regularly in Greenville.
- The year after we moved into our prayer room downtown, a new city ordinance was passed that made it illegal for new bars and clubs to open downtown. Many of them shut down and were replaced by stores, restaurants and coffee shops.
- Massive renovations took place in the neighborhood around us as we saw the city literally transformed before our eyes as we prayed in our little upper room.
These are some of the big picture answered prayers, but we also saw many individuals saved, healed and delivered as well. And if we see clearly how God answered these massive requests, how much was He doing that we did not see in response to our 7000+ hours of prayer from the Boiler Room?
7. Prayer Takes Time
“So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” Luke 11:9
One of the greatest challenges in prayer is perseverance. For a number of various reasons, it usually takes multiple asks, seeks or knocks before we get an answer to our prayers.
Mike Bickle says that you have to measure the effectiveness of your intercession in decades. We set out to pray at the Boiler Room in faith, and if we had quit after a few months, we would have never seen all that God could do.
Unfortunately many people quit right before the breakthrough. Like a woman in labor, many times the moment of greatest pressure and pain is the moment right before something beautiful is birthed.
If I had one encouragement for you in prayer it would be simply… do not quit!