What Does The Bible S
ay?
A weekly column of the Robison Street Church of Christ, 301 Robison Street. Send your questions to P.O. Box 846, Edna, Texas 77957.
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The Prayer
“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42, ESV)
Prayer is talking to God. Jesus taught His disciples to do it. Today, followers of Jesus can come to God in prayer through Him (John 14:6; Heb. 4:14-16). But did you notice that here in our passage, it says, “the prayers” and not simply “prayer”?
Now some have suggested that here, in Acts 2:42, Luke’s use of the definite article before each of these practices should affect our understanding of each (i.e. THE fellowship, THE breaking of bread, etc.). But because Luke uses the definite article here along with the plural form of the word prayer some believe that he may be referring to some specific kind of prayers.
Throughout the scripture we have examples of people, both individually and collectively offering what we might call spontaneous prayers. But over time, as God gave instructions in the Law surrounding the Tabernacle and the Temple worship, the Jews seemed to have also developed set times of prayer (Deut. 6:7; Num. 28:4; Dan. 6:10; Ps. 55:17). After the Babylonian exile, the synagogues provided a place where people who lived too far from Jerusalem and the Temple could gather and pray.
The New Testament does show us that some early Christians continued to observe these set times of prayer (Acts 2:46; 3:1; 5:12; 10:3-4, 30; 11:5). Of course, there is no indication that these times precluded private devotion or other times when the church would come together and pray (Acts 4:31; 6:4; 12:5, 12). Perhaps the most important thing for us to take away from this is how important and frequent prayer was in the life of the community of believers. How often do you pray? How often do you pray with other believers?
– Phillip Stuckey – [email protected] “Come and see. Come and hear the good news of the Gospel. We meet at the corner of Robison and Church Streets on Sunday at 9:30 AM for Bible classes for all ages and 10:30 AM for worship and again at 6:00 PM for worship. We also meet on Wednesday at 7:00 PM for Bible classes for all ages.”
