Here’s a helpful way to understand the role of the mid-week prayer meeting in the life of the church: it’s there to stop food waste. In the UK, 9.5 million tonnes of good food are thrown away every year – even though 8.4 million people are classified as in ‘food poverty’. What a waste!
Closer to home, you might know the feeling of a forgotten, unopened bag of salad in the fridge that went off. Or maybe, for whatever reason, you’ve found yourself scraping a carefully prepared dinner into the bin. It’s a real disappointment.
Well, the church prayer meeting’s role is to stop food waste, but I’m not talking physically, but spiritually. The prayer meeting helps prevent the food that God gave us on Sunday from going off and being unused!
Spiritual food
What God gives us on Sunday is food. It’s spiritual nutrition. And it’s designed to be our major spiritual input of the week. Of course, we supplement it daily with our private and family intake of God’s Word, but Sunday is our main feeding time.
When the Word of God is preached, Hebrews 5 calls it either ‘milk’ or ‘solid food’. But either way, God’s Word is designed to make us grow. What he gives us in his Word on Sundays is good food.
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