Recently I was away on a business trip, and I was very late getting home. There was dense fog at the airport in Minnesota and my flight was delayed. In fact, I got to my church only ten minutes before the New Year's Eve service was to begin!

Just as the pilot's vision was obscured by the fog, our spiritual vision can be obscured by many things. It's important that we have spiritual vision, that we see where God wants us to go and what He wants us to do. If you don't have vision, you don't get direction.

In Acts 6 we see the vision of God for His people. It is two things: prayer and the Word. What God values we should value. What God's priorities are should be our priorities. And prayer and the ministry of the word were the priorities of the first church (see verse 4).

Right now, I want to stress the prayer part of that equation. One of the cornerstones of the church should be that we march forward on our knees, that we pray together.

I often quote Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a pastor in Victorian England. Thousands of people attended his church, the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. When anyone asked him the secret of the success of his preaching, his ministry, and his church he would say, "It's because I have a faithful congregation praying." He would take visitors to the basement of the church and point to a room where people were on their knees praying. And he said "Here is the powerhouse of the Metropolitan Tabernacle." Spurgeon called his prayer chapel the "boiler room." A boiler room may be out of the way, but it keeps everything going.

Spurgeon once told some ministers, "Brethren, we shall never see much change for the better in our churches in general until our prayer meeting occupies a higher place than the esteem of Christians."

So that's what I invite you do to this year. Be more involved in prayer. Meet together to pray. Be diligent in prayer in your quiet time. Be available to others for prayer when they express needs to you.

God knows every step we take. He knows our ups and downs. He'll be watching over us, as He has done all through our lives. But it's imperative that we come to Him with prayer and petition, thanksgiving and praise.

If all of God's people, the ordinary folks in the pews as well as the leaders, would get down on their knees more often this year and pray, can you imagine what God might do? It would be stellar!