Corporate prayer is kind of like a key. No one person is the key to corporate prayer. Corporate prayer is a unique blending of multiple anointings that unlock a unique door.
You have the anointing and power of the Spirit living on the inside of you. When you come together with other believers, your anointing mixes in a unique way with each one of their anointings to make a fuller measure of the Spirit.
Let me show you what I mean by fuller measure. Say we had a huge grand piano that needed to be moved. I could move that piano by myself if I inched it along a little at a time using all my strength, exerting everything I had. Or I could get 15 guys endowed with a lot of strength and I could ask them to move the piano. Working together, they could accomplish the
task with ease.
That's exactly the way it is with the corporate anointing. Mighty works can be accomplished when the anointing is multiplied by a group of people. Each person's anointing mixes with the other anointings available, which brings a greater supply of the Spirit.
That doesn't mean there is no place for praying individually. You do certain things on your own like reading your Bible, worshipping, and personal prayer times. But God will call groups of people to do certain things together that they cannot, get done on their own. That's when the corporate anointing is put into action.
Second Chronicles chapter 20 shows us an example of the corporate anointing at work. King Jehoshaphat was ruling at this time. He'd had peace in Israel until this point, but in verses 1–2, we read:
After this, the Moabites, the Ammonites, and with them the Meunites came against Jehoshaphat to battle. It was told Jehoshaphat, A great multitude has come against you from beyond the [Dead] Sea, from Edom; and behold they are in Hazazontamar, which is En-gedi. (Amp.)
When I used to read this scripture, I would get upset with Jehoshaphat. I thought, Why didn't Jehoshaphat go after Israel's enemies before this? He could have defeated them one at a time. But now they're attacking Israel together, all three at one time. Why did he wait until they all came at once? I would almost get mad at him when I thought about it. But then I noticed something in verse 10:
And now behold, the men of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, whom You would not let Israel invade when they came from the land of Egypt, and whom they turned from and did not destroy…. (Amp.)
It's very interesting that the Lord would not let him deal with their enemies when they were small in number. That tells me there are times when God will use an army or group of people to deal with a hoard of demons all at one time. That's exactly what's happened here.
When Jehoshaphat found out that they had surrounded him and were going to come up against him, look what he did:
Then Jehoshaphat feared, and set himself [determinedly, as his vital need] to seek the Lord; he proclaimed a fast in all Judah. And Judah gathered together to ask help from the Lord… (verses 3–4 Amp.)
They do not know how that help will come or what it will look like that God was going to send. So they began to seek Him about what to do.
God answered them through a man by the name of Jahaziel. While they were assembled together praying, Jahaziel began to prophesy and tell them what to do. They received direction from the Lord through the supply of one man.
I wonder if God would have spoken to Jehoshaphat alone concerning direction for the group if instead of calling a fast he had gone into the Lord by himself. I don’t know. But we can see in this corporate place, they got direction. That is very interesting.
Here is the direction he received:
Tomorrow go down to them. Behold, they will come up by the Ascent of Ziz, and you will find them at the end of the ravine before the Wilderness of Jeruel. You shall not need to fight in this battle; take your positions, stand still, and see the deliverance of the Lord [Who is] with you, O Judah and Jerusalem. Fear not nor be dismayed. Tomorrow go out against them, for the Lord is with you. (verses 16–17 Amp.)
The Lord told them from the beginning that they would not fight in the battle. But then He said something interesting: "Take your position." In other words, this won't be a natural battle, but a spiritual one. Don't take a natural battle position, but a spiritual one.
Jehoshaphat then bowed before the Lord; verse 20 continues the story:
And they rose early in the morning and went out into the Wilderness of Tekoa; and as they went out, Jehoshaphat stood and said, Hear me, O Judah, and you inhabitants of Jerusalem! Believe in the Lord your God and you shall be established; believe and remain steadfast to His prophets and you shall prosper. (Amp.)
Notice verse 21:
When he had consulted with the people, he appointed singers to sing to the Lord and praise Him in their holy [priestly] garments as they went out before the army, saying, Give thanks to the Lord, for His mercy and loving-kindness endure forever! (Amp.)
I believe it wasn't just the worship or their singing that released spiritual victory. I believe it was their supply of the Spirit of God. It was the presence of God that was upon them collectively. What they carried began to release heavenly divine faculties that caused the Lord to send ambushments. We don't know what these ambushments were. We don't know if angels came or a presence came over that whole battlefield that brought confusion to the camp and made them turn on each other. We don't know what it was or what it looked like; we just know the Lord set ambushments against these men of Ammon, Moab, and Mt. Seir.
After the battle was over, verse 29 tells us the fear of God came upon all the surrounding kingdoms when they heard that the Lord had fought against the enemies of Israel.
But it wasn't just Him. It was His people and the power and presence of God they carried with them when they went out to meet the enemy is what caused the victory to come. And they took a great spoil.
Let's look at another story. In 1 Samuel chapter 10, God is getting ready to put a king into office. In the natural, Saul was not king material; he was shy, timid, and really incapable of being king. But in 1 Samuel 10:1, Samuel took the oil and anointed Saul to be king anyway.
I would have thought that would be enough. If you're anointed to be king, then you're anointed to be king. But it wasn't. And Samuel knew that Saul still had not come to the fullness of that position so he could operate as king like he needed to. So Samuel told him what to do. The last thing he instructed is in verses 5–6:
After that you will come to the hill of God, where the garrison of the Philistines is; and when you come to the city, you will meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place with harp, tambourine, flute, and lyre before them, prophesying. Then the Spirit of the Lord will come upon you mightily, and you will show yourself to be a prophet with them; and you will be turned into another man. (Amp.)
Before he could be king, Saul needed to be turned into another man before he could operate in the office of king. How was he going to be changed into another man? He wasgoing to get an impartation from other people that would help set him in his place.
When these signs meet you, do whatever you find to be done, for God is with you. … And when [Saul] had turned his back to leave Samuel, God gave him another heart, and all these signs came to pass that day. When they came to the hill [Gibeah], behold, a band of prophets met him; and the Spirit of God came mightily upon him, and he spoke under divine inspiration among them. And when all who knew Saul before saw that he spoke by inspiration among the [schooled] prophets, the people said one to another, What has come over [him, who is nobody but] the son of Kish? (verses 7, 9–11 Amp.)
They knew he was changed. They knew he was a new man. And that's what Saul needed to stand in the office of king.
We see something very important here. Iron sharpens iron. Supernatural relationships inspire one another. The association Saul had with those prophets, the supernatural giftings on others helped him to step over into his supernatural office.
You see, if Saul was ever going to get into his office, he needed to be among those in their offices. The supernatural in others activated the supernatural in him.
God puts us where He wants us and He sets members all around us to supply us with something we cannot get by ourselves. Then everybody increases all together.
I've seen this in action. A friend of mine, Patsy Cameneti, told me that when she was a teenager in her dad's church, they would have a man come to their ministry by the name of David Grant. He had an anointing on him that would call forth calls of God. When he came, the whole youth group would turn out and pray all night for the call of God on their lives. She said it was the most incredible thing she had ever seen.
See, the anointing and supply that was on that man produced something in those teenagers that caused them to pray concerning the calls on their lives. It inspired them to get over into their calls.
By the grace of God, each of us has an anointing. If you take my anointing and your anointing and you put those two anointings together, what you have is a whole new anointing that has never existed before.
This is the power of what we call corporate prayer.
Years ago, something interesting happened in one of our prayer groups that demonstrates this unique connection provided by the corporate anointing. There was a certain woman who came whenever she could to one of the groups I was participating in; she couldn't come every time because of her job.
Her husband was a doctor. Every time she came, we would begin to pray about medical research. But when she wasn't in the group, the anointing to pray for medical research would not come. She carried a unique supply that couldn't be accessed when she wasn't there. We would try to pray about the same type of thing when she wasn't there, but we couldn't get an anointing on it.
During our prayer times with her, the Lord spoke to us all about the laser and how it would replace so many surgeries. This was way before any of this became a reality. You never heard about anything like that. And we would never tell anyone about it because they would think we were absolutely nuts.
But it was very interesting to us that the only time we could get over praying about that was when she was there. Something about the anointing on her released us into that doorway where we could get over into that dimension and we could pray about that.
When we talk about this corporate setting, I need to point out that we're not talking about a gathering; we're talking about an assembly. A gathering is very different than an assembly. If you think about a puzzle that has lots of pieces, if you didn’t have the picture on the box showing you what it was supposed to look like, you’d just have a "gathering" of all those pieces in the box. You wouldn't know what the picture was supposed to look like. But when you have the assembly of that picture on the top of the box, it's very easy to start putting the pieces together.
So it is with the church and so it is in an assembly.
We gather for concerts. We gather for speeches. We gather for the movies. But it's totally different than assembling together for church. Remember what Jesus said: Don't forsake the assembling of yourselves together (Hebrews 10:25). When you go to church, you get something when you are with those people of God.
Years ago, there was a lady I had counseled for a long time. There was a woman who had done something ugly to her. And every time she would see that person, all of that unforgiveness would come up even though she had forgiven her. She had forgiven her by faith, but she couldn't forget it. One day, the ability to forgive and forget what that person did to her finally came. This is what she told me: "One night when I came to church, there was a whole group of believers, people that I knew all around me. An anointing from those people around me came into me and that anointing from those people delivered me!"
Would she have gotten that if she was just sitting at home all alone? No. It came from the corporate anointing available when being assembled together with other believers.
Now I could go on and on with stories from the Old and New Testament that show the power of the corporate anointing, but I think you get the idea. From corporate prayer comes a corporate cause. A corporate cause produces a corporate cry. The corporate cry produces corporate signs and wonders, which ultimately produces corporate victory.
That's what corporate prayer is all about.
Excerpt permission granted by Mac Hammond Ministries
A teacher and an author, Lynne publishes a newsletter called Prayer Notes, has written numerous books, and currently serves as the national prayer director for Daughters for Zion. Her passion for inspiring and leading others into the life of Spirit-led prayer continues to take her around the world to minister to believers whose heart cry, like hers, is “Lord, teach me to pray!”
