When the “Oh” Comes Back to the Prayer Meeting
Whether we realize it or not, for better or for worse, we have all been discipled in prayer. We have learned what prayer should sound like, how urgent it should be, and what we can expect (or not expect) it to accomplish.
When I first became a Christian, I was profoundly blessed to have an older woman named Lorraine disciple me in prayer. She modeled for me how to behold Jesus, how to press through apathy and spiritual resistance, and how to contend for lost people with a kind of fervor and tenacity that marked my entire life. But in this season, I find myself being mentored in prayer again… this time by the prophet Isaiah.
Isaiah 64 begins with a small word that somehow encapsulated the heart cry of revival: Oh.
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down.”
Oh is the urgent and unpolished utterance of desperation for divine intervention, for God's presence and power to be manifest. It’s the wordless groan that settles on the human heart when God’s burdens become our burdens—when our human fragility can not contain the weight of his love, justice, and holiness. Oh strips us of our ego and image and draws us into a kind of prayer that wounds us with holy longing that gives God no rest until he moves. This kind of prayer is called travail.
Zach Meerkreebs, in his book Lowly, shares how he himself was discipled into this kind of crushing, burden-bearing prayer by David Thomas of Asbury. Out of that formation, he defines travailing prayer as “a step away from casual and polite prayer toward laborious and unhindered prayer, like childbirth.” It’s prayer that costs us something. In fact, David Thomas would even say: “Nothing in the kingdom of God happens until someone hurts for it.”
I’ve seen this in my own life. Last year, in a prayer room, I encountered what I can only describe as God’s suffering love for lost people resting heavily on my spirit. The weight of it moved me into an agonizing place of groaning intercession, marked by weeping, sweating, and even shaking as I travailed before the Lord for five of my lost friends. At one point I pulled a few trusted friends aside and said, “Guys, I think I’m crazy! What is happening to me?!”
Later that night, a group of us went out to a pub for wings. And one by one, four of those five friends walked into that very pub. I got to briefly share with each of them how God had placed them on my heart and how they had become the focus of my prayers just hours earlier. And this past year one by one, many of my friends who I have been wounded for in prayer have been showing up at church, attending Alpha courses, and even giving their lives to Jesus.
I’m utterly convinced that it's true… Nothing in the kingdom of God happens until someone hurts for it. I’m convinced that prayer is not always supposed to be sentimental or safe. It’s costly. It’s wounding at times. And it is how, like Isaiah mentions, it rends the heavens for God to break into earth.
And so, are you willing to get the Oh back into your prayer life? Back in the church? Because Jesus is too worthy, salvation is too beautiful, and the need of the hour is too great to settle for anything less.
Emily Cordon Drainville
Executive Pastor, Sanctuary Church Providence