Acts 4:23,24 – And being let go, they went to their own companions and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them. So when they heard that, they raised their voice to God with one accord…
United, fervent prayer lies at the heart of every true move of the Spirit of God. It could be said that prayer opens the heavens for God’s Spirit to be poured out but it could also be argued is that the Holy Spirit Himself inspires those prayers for an outpouring. In other words it always starts and ends with God. Jonathan Edwards experienced a number of seasons of outpouring in his church but like any other pastor would become anxious when there was apparently a dry season setting in upon the church. In one of those seasons Edwards began to call for unified prayer and is credited with calling this unified prayer a concert of prayer. I love that concept of a concert of prayer because when many voices are lifted up to the Lord they begin to blend into one unified voice similar to what happens in a musical symphony. Many instruments blending together in harmony to play one beautiful song. This is the idea of a concert of prayer, many voices harmonizing and becoming one unified voice before the Lord. Here is how Steven Stein describes Edwards on the Concert of prayer.
“Edwards worked for the union (of believers in prayer) because he saw it as a solution to the religious problems plaguing New England. In place of ecclesiastical disruption and division, the plan offered a new basis for community and harmony. Christians engaged in prayer with one another would constitute “one family, one holy and happy society.” Instead of religious drought in the land, the proposal held out the hope of a new era of the Spirit. If a union of praying Christians can be realized, he asked, “who knows what it may come to at last?” Perhaps the united prayers would even “open the doors and windows of heaven, that have so long been shut up, and been as brass over the heads of the inhabitants of the earth, as to spiritual showers”.
This obviously reminds us of the prayer meetings in the book of Acts, many voices becoming one voice before the Lord. To me, the most beautiful expression of the Concert of prayer is when many voices sing and harmonize as they all sing in the Spirit. This is the place of commanded blessing, the place of supernatural unity found in corporate prayer.
