At the close of the service, the pastor shared with my friend what had happened. An American team of preachers had been conducting evangelistic meetings in the church that week. They had great success and saw the blessings of the Lord. However, the night before my friend's arrival, the secret police interrogated the Americans, sent them to Bucharest, and then deported them.

That left the church without an evangelist for the remainder of the week, so the congregation gathered to ask God to send one. Just as they were praying, my friend walked in.

There was great reason for weeping and rejoicing. This church had her eyes fixed on Jesus. She saw Him, a loving, wonderful, conquering Savior.

Rulers who try to destroy the church will be rendered helpless in the face of prayer. The praying church is the church that will invade Satan's territory and return with the spoils of victory. It's the praying church that will win the world to Jesus. We need congregations who make prayer a priority.

No one has written about prayer with the inspiration of E.M. Bounds. It has been said of him, "Edward McKendree Bounds did not merely pray well that he might write well about prayer. He prayed because the needs of the world were upon him."

Jesus told his disciples, "The harvest is plenteous, but he laborers are few; pray ye therefore" (Matthew 9: 38). Jesus knew that the secret to conquering the multitudes for His glory was in the prayer closets of His disciples.

I considered two men prayer partners at Hahn Baptist Church. They were Don Shelton, a deacon, and Ken Leeburg, the attorney.

Ken was a runner. He asked if we could get together a couple times a week to run. He wanted to be discipled and thought running might provide time for that kind of a relationship.

I agreed to run with Ken, even though I was just a jogger. He was much faster than I. I devised a plan to slow him down. We would memorize Scripture while we ran, choosing only verses that I already knew. While he was running, he repeated the Scripture over and over. My strategy worked. It slowed Ken down.

The first verse he memorized was Jeremiah 33:3, "Call unto Me, and I will answer thee and show thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not." Many times, we would pray together and claim that verse. We dreamed of how we would reach entire nations with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Then we dreamed of reaching entire continents and even the world.

When burdens became too great for us, we claimed Jeremiah 33:3. On occasion, the presence of God was so real that we would begin to shout praises to Him. The greatest and deepest friendships are born in prayer.

Ken had a hill that he loved to run, a steep quarter mile that taught me a lot about prayer. It was so hard to climb that I called it "Difficulty."

When we would climb "Difficulty," Ken would shout in true military fashion, "Up the hill-over the hill-through the hill-conquer the hill-come on, Sam. You can do it!" Ken would be at the top when I was only halfway. "Remember the verse, Sam! You can conquer the hill!"

A prayer partner stands with us in the face of difficulty and encourages us to look up. He climbs the hill and tells us that God can give us strength to do the same.

When we come into spiritual agreement with our prayer partner, the power of all heaven is released. Jesus said, "Again, I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven. For where two or three have gathered together in My name there I am in their midst."

One of the most powerful preachers in the Western world in the last 150 years was Charles Haddon Spurgeon. In the mid-1800s, at the age of 19, Spurgeon shook London with his preaching. After D.L. Moody visited England, he was asked, "Did you hear Spurgeon preach?" He responded. "Yes, but better still, I heard him pray."

The Western world today does not need better preachers. We need better pray-ers. Samuel Chadwick said, "The one concern of the devil is to keep the saints from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom, but trembles when we pray."6

It's interesting that the disciples never asked Jesus to teach them to preach. But they did ask Him to teach them to pray. Jesus taught that one secret of powerful praying is simply to pry in secret. "But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut the door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you" (Matthew 6:6. NASB).

It's in the secret chamber that we really get to know God. The greatest command in Scripture is to love God. When we love someone we want to spend times alone with that person to get to know him better and increase our capacity to love him.

Do you love God? If so, how much time do you spend with Him? Can we really love Him if we spend too little time with Him?

The King of kings and Lord of lords invites us to a private meeting with Himself every day. It's an intimate meeting of a good and wonderful Father with a needy child. In these secret meetings, we get to know the true character of the loving Father. And every day our love for Him grows.

But something else happens. We receive the touch of His character on our inner beings. We leave each meeting a little more like the Son. We're being conformed to His image. We seem to desire more what He desires and disdain what He disdains.

This is true prayer. We enter the secret chamber not to get something from God. We enter to get to know the true and living God. And as we get to know Him we discover how good He is. The good Father blesses us with all the good things that we need. As a result, we have the joy and power needed to reach a lost and dying world.

Evangelist Charles Finney said, "Search the history of the world, and you will find that where there has been most true prayer, and the soul has been most deeply inbred with the divine presence, there God has most abundantly and richly blessed the soul. Who does not know that holy men of old were eminent of usefulness and power according as they were faithful and mighty in prayer."