LAST WEEK I talked about prayer. I want to go on with this topic today, and keep looking at how prayer can change our life together as a church.

Our passage from Matthew's gospel can be easily divided into three sections, which I describe as

The Problem of Discipline,
The Authority of the Believer and
The Power of Prayer.

If we want to build this church into a powerful church — a spiritually powerful church — then we have to do it the Biblical way. But we should commit ourselves to spiritual power, and not the power that this world uses.
The world uses political and military power. But Jesus said to Pontius Pilate, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” If Jesus had chosen to use the power of this world, he could have called ten thousand angels to his aid. If he had chosen to do it the way everyone else did, he could have called his disciples and followers to rescue him. Send Peter and John out, get them to call the rest of the twelve, send the twelve to call every known sympathiser in Jerusalem, and he'd soon be freed.
But he went to the cross — went alone.

As John Chrysostom, the great fourth century preacher remarked, as soon as we use wolves' tactics, we cease being sheep and become wolves ourselves. Yet Christians have often refused to acknowledge that fact.

A few months ago, I got an e-mail from the cousin of one of my workmates. George is an earnest Coptic Christian, and he was very distressed. He had received an e-mail from someone telling him that a movie was under production in Hollywood, and it depicted Jesus and his disciples as a coven of homosexuals.
What George sent me was a detailed account of how Christians could twist political arms to get the authorities to ban this blasphemy.
I have no difficulty in seeing that such a movie would be blasphemous. I do wonder why we would try to take arms against a movie which was, in fact, released over ten years ago, and faded within weeks of appearing. Sometimes God's defenders move pretty slowly!
What I did have problems with was that George and his friends proposed to use the weapons of this world to fight a spiritual battle. It's like those silly Hollywood movies where the heroes go after ugly monsters supposed to be demons and blast them with napalm!
I explained to George how solutions of a spiritual nature could be found, and he was quite impressed. He'd never thought ot doing it that way. Worldly people use worldly methods to achieve Kingdom ends, and sometimes even seduce believers. But there is no held in their methods.

So, we are talking about spiritual power, a power to get at the spiritual forces which underlie what is happening in our world, and the sources of that kind of power are spiritual in themselves.

THE PROBLEM OF DISCIPLINE
If we want spiritual power; if we want to be able to go out with boldness into our work-places and into our neighbourhoods, we need a power to do it which will tear down the enemy's strongholds and level the rough places so that our King can come in his triumphant power.

18:15 If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. 16 But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that `every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

To obtain spiritual power, to get power in prayer, we need a level of discipline. We just read about that.
One of our great problems as a church is our low level of spiritual discipline.

The Psalmist says,

PS 133:1 How good and pleasant it is
when brothers live together in unity!
It is like precious oil poured on the head,
running down on the beard,
running down on Aaron’s beard,
down upon the collar of his robes.
It is as if the dew of Hermon
were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the LORD bestows his blessing,
even life forevermore.

The place of unity in Christ is the place of God–sent fruitfulness.
Unity never just happens. We have to strive for it. But, while individuals have striven in the past, it has never been a whole-of-church thing. Discipline is for disciples who follow their Lord.

I remember once — think it was at the end of a service — Divina raised her hand and challenged me, because there had been a breakdown of fellowship between the Greens and the Bautistas, and she wanted to make it right, whatever the cost. I valued what she did that day. Do you remember that, Divina? On several occasions I approached a former member about healing a breakdown in fellowship, two or three times in the course of members' meetings or special weekends of prayer that we held. It has to be done. But do we do it consistently and universally? Do we all do it, and keep doing it until we have broken down the barriers?

When I was on Beach Mission many years ago, we had absolutely no results in our outreach until we dealt with the broken fellowship in our team. When we confessed to each other and prayed for restored fruitfulness, we received it. Those who were ringleaders in our problems and those who perhaps only laughed when others did something hurtful, it didn't matter. We all had to deal with it. And, in those last three days of mission, we had more people respond to Christ than in any ten day mission before that.

The whole point of this passage is to restore fellowship.

If it's a person–to–person fault, deal with it personally. The one thing Jesus doesn't give us room for it ignoring the problem.

I was talking to a friend on Friday, and she told me about how she had been very hurt by other family members several years ago. Today, she can see that they were right in what they wanted of her, but wrong in how they gained their goals.
I said, “Maybe you need to let them know how you felt.”
She said, “It was a while ago, and maybe it's just better to let it all lie now. I'm engaged, and I don't want to drag my fiancé into it; and our family tends to wait until things simmer down. We don't talk much about these things.”

I can understand that. It sounds a lot like my own background. But I also know that things left to lie generally rot, and things that rot cause what they touch to rot, too. A family filled with rot is not a pretty sight.

And a church filled with rot is ugly, too. I suppose that's what turns people away so often from churches.

When there is an unresolved problem, eventually it becomes the concern of the whole church. If you can't deal with it face to face, then you bring in the rest of the fellowship. And, if need be, you exclude the person from fellowship until he or she repents and is willing to negotiate a settlement.
There will never be blessing if we leave interpersonal problems to lie. And that means that our prayers will be of little value if we don't deal with the things which divide us.
I don't know what things these might be, but I know that we have to clean out the rubbish before the Spirit can take up full control, because he is the Holy Spirit, and needs a Holy environment.

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BELIEVER
The next important truth is that we are intended to have spiritual authority.
There are many Biblical passages which say the same thing in different ways.
Last year we had a great gathering of the churches in our district, and we shared some affirmations about the privileges we have in Christ. There were many good Biblical truths there.
Yet a number of people were disappointed. I was one of them.
The original aim was to confess our faults to one another, and then to acknowledge the authority Christ gives us. We failed to get things in their right order.

When we deal with the hindrances, then we have the authority.

There are many fundamentalist movements around the world these days. I hope we aren't fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is based on fear. It's the same as the little kid who pushes in fingers in his ears and stamps his feet and cries, “I won't listen! I won't listen!” and then punches his opponent.
We don't have to fear what is out there. As Jesus said,

18:18 I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

Are the world's powers arrayed against us? Then bind them in the strong name of Jesus!
Does satan seek to destroy our peace? Bind him in the strong name of Jesus!

When that woman came to drop in and began showing signs of being demonised, I questioned the demons, and they were forced by the name of Jesus to declare themselves. Then I commanded the demons to leave. I should have been more specific: they went and took the woman with them.
But I want to decalre that I had access only to a tiny amount of spiritual power to bind those forces.

Jesus says that all of us together have power to bind and loose. The Greek is consistently plural.

Recently there was a news report about the world's then most powerful computer. It had been developed by a team at an American university. You might imagine a giant box filling a whole factory site, or, if you follow these things, you might have read of a Cray supercomputer or the Big Blue which IBM built to beat Boris Spassky at chess.

It wasn't much like that at all. They got about 300 office computers less powerful than the one I have in the church office here and connected them together. They could do certain types of computation far faster than a Pentium 4, even faster than the top Athlon processor can do in your top-of-the-line office or games computer.

And God's plan is to string us all together in the same way, so that we become vastly more powerful than all of us can be when we work alone. When we have right relationships, we can begin working in mighty spiritual power.

THE POWER OF PRAYER
Finally we see how this spiritual power is unleashed. People brought together in discipleship and linked closely to one another can see unanticipated results in their prayers.

18:19 “Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.”

Two of us agree and the prayer is answered? It sounds too good to be true!
And it is.
What I mean is, we don't merely say, “Oh yes, we want so and so, and God, you've got to give it to us.”
It's coming together in prayer in the name of Jesus which gains us the results.

In the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, The Pirates of Penzances, at the end, the pirates and the policemen hunting them meet. There is a short battle, and the pirates easily overpower the police. The police chief is lying on his back on the ground with a pirate's sword to his neck.cries out to the pirates to surrender “...in the name of Queen Victoria.”
Immediately the pirates surrender. They might be pirates, but they are not disloyal to Her Majesty. They recognise her authority in the actions of the policemen.

But, if the police chief had said, “In the name of the Queen, stand on your head in the corner for an hour,” they probably wouldn't have done it, because that isn't the way in English law.

And asking something in Jesus name means asking with the authority Jesus has given us to ask. It's easy for me to pray for what would please me. But, when two of us pray together, we are less inclined to seek our own gain, and more inclined to seek the will of our Lord, Jesus.

I want to challenge us all at this point: is there anything among us which hinders the operation of the Holy Spirit? If we know of anythingt at all, it must be brought into the open and dealt with.
Second, are we using the authority we have to bind and to loose? Do we put the devil himself in chains? Do we find captives and break their chains through the power of Jesus Christ and his cross? If not, go back to point one... what is it in our midst which hinders the Holy Spirit?
Finally, are we praying as we should? Are we seeking the lost and the troubled and the sick, or are we at ease in Zion?

Today is a day to answer these questions. How do you respond to Jesus' challenge?
May he reveal more and more of himself to us even this morning.
AMEN