Corporate Prayer

Corporate Prayer – The Positives
Corporate prayer is the term used to describe praying together with other people—in small groups or in larger bodies of people. It is an important part of the church and in Acts 2:42, we learn that the early church prayed together: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”

Corporate prayer can be a positive experience in many ways.

Encouragement – praying with others can bring encouragement to the members of the group. There may be those in the group who are struggling with trials and temptations. As they are upheld in prayer, the Holy Spirit brings them encouragement and reassurance of His promises.

Unity of purpose – Corporate prayer has the ability to knit a group together in a bond of fellowship and praise. People are edified and unified in common faith. As people pray together, they build love and concern for others and display their dependence on God.

Worship – Corporate prayer brings intimate communion with the Savior.

Repentance – As people pray, the Holy Spirit brings conviction and draws His children to repentance.

Corporate Prayer – Is it more powerful?
Are corporate prayers somehow more powerful than prayers that are said in private? The Bible does not indicate that they are. Perhaps the misconception that some Christians have about the increased power corporate prayer is based on Matthew 18:19-20, “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. For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” It is important to read these verses in the context of the passage. The context addresses church discipline of a sinning member. When Christians think that these verses give them a “blank check” to be able to ask God for anything, it is a deep misinterpretation of the passage. Just because two or three people are gathered together in Jesus’ name, they don’t acquire some magical power that assures God will answer their prayer according to their wishes. Yes, Jesus is present when people pray together, but He is equally present when a believer prays individually.

Corporate prayer isn’t about getting enough people together to pray until God bends His will to our will. Instead, prayer (corporate and private) is about cooperating with God and abandoning our desires and submitting to God’s will. In fact, Matthew 6:8 says, “…for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

Corporate Prayer – Reminders
Whether we are participating in corporate prayer or praying in private, the Bible gives us guidance on how to pray.

We are to pray in humility – “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up” (James 4:10).

We are to call on God in Truth – “The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth” (Psalm 145:18).

We are to be obedient – “Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him” (1 John 3:21-22).

We are to be thankful and not anxious – “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6).

We are to pray in confidence – “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

We are warned against praying prayers to be showy, long-winded, or hypocritical: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

It is important to remember that some people aren’t comfortable praying aloud in a group. Encourage everyone to pray silently while others pray aloud. To encourage participation, have each person write a single request or a simple prayer on a note card. Swap the requests and have the group read them aloud. This can also be done with simple prayers of thanksgiving. Or the group can read a psalm together with each person reading a verse or section. Be creative and think of simple ways to help those in your group gain confidence.

Comment by Neaseno

I remember the way we used to pray as a group on the bluff where I grew up. Everybody was of one accord and half of them didn’t speak English, but it is the way we all grew up. As a child, I learned the ways of the Neshnabek in prayer and working together. We called it widoktadwen. That word can mean many things in context, depending on how one uses it.

When I say everyone was of one accord, I mean everyone. Even small children were encouraged to pray and babies were kept quiet out of respect for the God. We all shared common beliefs when we came together to pray or ceremony.

There was also a time for private prayers too, we could call it individuation, wherein the person would go out and pray by themselves, vision questing, or simply laying an offering down with their prayers. Even Vision Questing could be a time of corporate prayer though, with everyone praying for the “Faster” and that he/she would have a good fast and pray good prayers for the group, for that is what fasting was all about originally. Nowadays, this business of vision questing or fasting has gotten out of hand in that some folks think they are going out for individual power or gifts. That can happen too, but it was always carefully orchestrated by the elders and usually done by qualified medicine people going out on behalf of the people.

There seems to be a individualistic approach to all this new-fangled fasting folks do today. There is nothing widoktadwen about that at all. We need to get back to the way we did things when our elders were here and in charge. There are some of us that still know of these ways and we are still doing them.

Iw enajmoyan

Nin se Neaseno

https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Meditations/meditations.html

Jesus’ Last Week Against Jewish Background

By Julia BlumApril 8, 2021No comments

Originally, I was going to continue to discuss today “the tough questions of Passover”: why “his own received him not” and what the place of Israel is in this script written by God. Especially on days such as the one on which I am now writing – Yom HaShoah,  Holocaust Remembrance Day – the last sentence of my previous post begs to be continued: “Knowing that He came not only for His own suffering but also for the suffering of His own people – chosen not to recognize and thus to become “enemies for your sake” – Jesus weeps openly over all the torment to be unleashed on Israel in His name…”  However, once again, questions from the comments have changed my plans. We will definitely talk more about the Israel and Jesus dynamic – but today, we will try to figure out the events of the Last Week.

The day and date of Jesus’ crucifixion have been among the most debated topics throughout the history of the New Testament. I have also addressed this issue here before, however, I’ve never had all the ‘Jewish’ arguments brought together, and this is what I will try to do today. As always, I would like to add a disclaimer:  I don’t claim to have the final answers—nobody can be one hundred percent certain exactly how and when these events took place. Moreover, even though I will share some Hebrew insights with you here, I still want us to remember that there is always the possibility that we are missing something—“The secret things belong to the Lord”. My point is that we don’t have to stumble over this story: there are several plausible scenarios presenting the final days of Jesus.

We all know the traditional concept: The Last Supper was the Passover meal (Seder) that took place on Thursday night, and on Friday, Jesus was crucified. This view seems to be supported by the synoptic gospels. However, there is a well-known problem of discrepancy between the synoptic gospels and the Gospel of John, which seem to date all these events a day earlier than the synoptics do.  Numerous attempts were made to harmonize all the gospel accounts, in particular with the help of the ‘different calendars’ concept: If different calendars were in use, then the feast days were calculated differently by different groups. First, the scholars distinguished between the Pharisaic date of Passover and the Sadducean date a day earlier, which might lie behind the Gospel of John. Even more evidence points to the fact that the Essenes also used their own calendar. The famous story of the man with a water jar[1] is based on that—a man carrying water could only have been an Essene; Essenes had their communities in various towns, and also in Jerusalem, and since they used a different calendar, their guest rooms were still available. That’s why Jesus knew that a room would be available for the Last Supper—and He may have followed their calendar as well.

Personally, I don’t accept this concept. I don’t think the Last Supper was the traditional Passover meal. Why?  First of all, I have always been perplexed by the fact that when Judah left in the middle of the Last Supper,  “some thought, because Judas had the money box, that Jesus had said to him, “Buy those things we need for the feast”. In today’s Israel, everything would be closed during the Feast, but even if something was open, no pious Jew would think of buying something with money on the Feast day.

There is another and much more important argument, however: the Jewish texts say explicitly that the paschal lamb had to be eaten during the Passover meal:

A paschal lamb is invalid if it was slaughtered for those who will not eat it…[2]

The eating of the paschal sacrifice was the principal part of the Seder – therefore the meal that happened BEFORE the sacrifice, by definition, could have not be perceived as a Seder.

If the Last Supper was not a Seder, what was it? What was the nature of this meal? Let me share with you some additional quotations from the Pesachim tractate of the Mishnah:

… The sages say that in Judah they would work on the day before Pesacĥ until noon, whereas in the Galilee they did not work at all…. When someone goes from a place where they do work to a place where they do not (or from a place where they do not to a place where they do) we apply the more severe restrictions of both the place where he comes from and the place he is going to…[3]

We see that there were different festival traditions in different places. As we all know, Jesus and his disciples were Galileans, therefore, they would have observed the Galilean traditions. There were several differences between Judean and Galilean Passover observance, but the most important one was a special fast – the Fast of the Firstborns, in remembrance of the firstborn Israelites who were saved from death (that is why we read in the Mishnah that “in the Galilee, they didn’t work at all” on Passover day). The fast took place on Nisan 14, on the day of Passover[4].

In Hebrew, the last meal before the fast is called seudah maphsehket  (if you have ever been in Israel for Yom Kippur, you would know that seudah maphsehket, the last meal before Yom Kippur fast, is a very important and special event indeed). Thus, in the Galilean tradition, there had to be this special meal at the beginning of Passover (Nisan 14^th) called seudah maphsehket—the Last Meal before the whole day fast. The next meal would be the Passover meal, the Seder.

Let us now try to figure out the events of Jesus’ last week, starting from His resurrection on the early hours of Yom Rishon (Sunday) – because Sunday is a given. To make it simple, we will just count three nights back and arrive at Thursday, and then everything else falls into place. It was on Wednesday Nisan 13 that the disciples prepared this special meal that we call the Last Supper and that was, in fact, seudah maphsehket – the last meal before the Fast of the Firstborns. Jesus and the disciples ate this meal on Wednesday night, at the beginning of the Passover, as the day changed to Nisan 14; then Jesus was arrested that night, tried and convicted early on Thursday morning, and then crucified during the day – and all this happened during Passover day, Nisan 14, Thursday.

Some people ask: why Thursday, and not Wednesday? First, if Jesus died on the cross on Wednesday, he had to enter Jerusalem four days before, the very same day when the perfect lamb was to be set apart in Exodus 12 – and in this case, it would be Shabbat, a highly unlikely time for entering Jerusalem. Second, the Greek of John 20:1 suggests the early hours of the morning, dawn, the day-break watch: “Now the first day of the week Mary Magdalene went to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb”. This means that the night from Motzey Shabbat (the exit of Shabbat) through Sunday morning, was one of three nights. In this sense, only Thursday seems to “work” both backward and forward: both Palm Sunday and the sign of Jonah make sense then. Thus, on Thursday, Nisan 14, Jesus died on the cross; and on Sunday, Nisan 17, He was resurrected!

[1] Mark 14:13

[2] Mishna, Tractate Pesachim, Chapter 5 Mishna 3

[3] Ibid., Chapter 4, Mishna 1

[4] You can read more about it in:  David H. Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary, ­ Jewish New Testament Publications, 1995, p. 77

I favor this explanation as explained by a Jew who has studied and knows her culture.

Iw enajmoyan

Nin se Neaseno

https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Blessings/Synagogue_Blessings/Birchot_HaShachar/birchot_hashachar.html

I love this as there are so many parallels to Neshnabek prayers when done right. I do this in the morning and select the appropriate prayers for that day and whatever it is I am doing for that day. We often seek for differences when we come together as a people, but I have spent my lifetime seeking similarities when traveling among other cultural groups. I am so glad my elders taught me to be accepting of others and I can understand why it is we had so many tribal groups living together where I grew up. I was surrounded by Bodewadmik, Ojibwek, Odawak, Menominik, Wimbyegok, and still others who often came for the ceremonies we held jointly.

It is good when brethren come together and worship the God of our desires and He is pleased when there is unity among the People of his Creation. I have so many happy memories of growing up among a people that were together and observed similarities instead of looking at our differences.

Iw enajmoyan ngom

Nin se Neaseno

Happy Days in him!

https://hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Parashah/parashah.html

Someone once asked me why I have such a great interest in Hebrew and the Jewish Holidays and I answered much of what the early Jews believed lines up with ancient Neshnabek beliefs. My mother and dad and other elders who have gone home now, also noticed the same similarities of belief I did. These elders were not just run of the mill Neshnabek, but what I call gete Neshnabek; i.e., real Natives.

I also noticed something else among both Jews and Neshnabek. They both have a tendency to take great pride in their traditional beliefs, but show such poor practice of them. In other words, many of them don’t walk the walk, they don’t walk like they talk.

Jews do it and so do Neshnabek! I have seen countless times when I was in the Lodges, many Neshnabek didn’t even attend the Lodge ceremonies, and many of those that did, took the teachings for granted, often going in and out of the Lodge for various reasons, not even focusing on why they were there. Many Christians and Jews do the same thing, the traditions cited and taught are often not observed by these groups. I have walked in both worlds and now am back in the world of Christ, and have made it a point to worship with all my heart and soul, and not just sit there warming a pew/bench.

I have been to Israel where many Jews take their beliefs very seriously, but there are just as many that do not. It is always happening among the Christian churches of America, with many evangelists, pastors and the like, preaching their hearts out, trying to wake up a sleeping congregation into a more heartfelt worship. I have seen the same thing among Neshnabek when I practiced my traditional teachings and ways.

Since coming back to the Lord and embracing him in my heart, I do not want to be found guilty of lukewarm worship and taking things for granted, as it were. When I was a practicing traditional believer of the Neshnabek Ways, I was not a lukewarm believer, as I saw so many do. I don’t want to be that type of believer in my practicing the Ways of Christ either. Things are supposed to be presented as fresh and invigorating to the soul and spirit of man, as presented by the teachers of said beliefs, whether they be Christian, Jewish or Neshnabek. If they come fresh to me, I want to eat of His Word as presented by him and his teachers, and put them to work in my soul and spirit. I do not want to be just a Hearer of the Word, but a Doer! I don’t want to simply warm a bench/pew, but enter into his gates with thanksgiving, be it a humble Native Lodge or a grand church, or my prayer closet. I want my Savior to know I love him and don’t take anything for granted that he presents to me through his many servants.

Iw enajmoyan

Nin se Neaseno

https://hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Parashah/parashah.html

So Easter has come and gone for most, eh? I must say some things that I feel very deeply. Easter has always been for me, since I learned how a Holy God came to this Earth Time, wrapped in the flesh of one called Jesus the Christ, Yehuah ha Mashiaac, Lord Jesus Christ, The Anointed One, The Son of God, etc., etc.

I have noticed over the space of 68 years some things among the Believers of this same Son of God. For one, there are those who get their best “Sunday go to Meeting” clothes on for this one specific day, Easter Sunday; that is when it falls on a Sunday, and attend church. One doesn’t see them again until Christmas or the following Easter again. Christmas, because of the Special Programs churches sponsor for their congregations and little folk among them. Many of these folks don’t support their Pastors, the Church with their tithes and offerings, their prayers for the church’s growth in New Believers, and so on.

One also sees them for funerals, special meetings, but they are not to be seen otherwise. For those that are seen as faithful, many of them are more invisible than the Holiday crowd I just spoke of. Attending a physical church is not what I am speaking of here. I am speaking of those who faithfully support and pray for that body of other like minded believers. It is important to attend church if you are physically able to, for that is part of the Word of God, but we must not forget the other part of recognizing the body of Christ, who are the other believers of Christ.

For me, Easter is always here within my heart, for I always want Him arising deep within my being revealing his word to me and showing me where I fail to serve him completely, the Holy Spirit showing me what I need to work on to truly make it to the end, where I shall experience the salvation he spoke about. I want my Jesus to show me where I lack of his holiness, his righteousness, I want him to lead me in the Way Everlasting, as David did in the book of Psalms. I love him 365 days out of the year and though my disabilities have kind of removed me from the church attendance I love so much, I can still tithe and make my offerings, as well as pray and fast for the church and my Pastor. i.e, church: the body of Christ.

Oh, I am not trying to be a Holy Joe here, but when I offer my praises and prayers to a Holy God, I want them to make a difference. I don’t want to offer them in full view of others in the congregation just to demonstrate a sort of pride or ego, but I want to seek my Jesus humbly in my prayer closet, and when I have done it in secret, then my Heavenly Father can reward me openly, as his Word says. Oh folks, love the Lord God with all your heart, all your strength, all your might, and love your neighbor as yourself. Let us worship him each day as though what he has done is forever fresh in our minds and hearts, that of sacrificing his life, spilling his life’s blood and then arising again, claiming the keys to hell and death for us. He died for us, you and me!

He is my God, my Savior! I serve him 365/7 and praise him forevermore!

Nin se Neaseno.

Bozho ginwa ngom

Gi bzegwi o mnedos ngom kedwik gewinwa gi debwetagwzewat. Ode se edebwetagwziyan i mnomnwajmowen emnotagwzewat gi kekyewnenwik ngom…..

Hau mnowendemyek enedwendeman pene…..

Nin se Neaseno

https://hebrew4christians.com/training/

Learn the language of the coming kingdom, it’s all about learning languages today and everyday. Learning a language is also learning the behavior that goes with it. Just something for one to read and think on if you’ve a mind to do that sort of thing. I do it all the time cuz I have never believed I really belong here and I didn’t come from here. Headed for a different place, I am!

Nin se Neaseno