At Bethel Mission Outreach, we strive to honor the words of Christ in Mark 11: 15-17 by placing prayer at the center of everything we do. Jesus Christ is worthy of being exalted night and day, and without Him, all of our ministry efforts are in vain. (John 15:5)

We are fueling our missionary efforts with a prayer room that runs 24 hours a day, 6 days a week.  On Sunday we open 12 hours a day.

Not only does this increase our impact for the Kingdom of God, it also creates an environment where young adults, children, and parents from the surrounding villages can come and encounter the Lord. By regularly proclaiming the gospel, teaching from the Bible, and providing a place of prayer to seek the Lord we are able to more effectively disciple new believers.

About prayer, A.W. Tozer wrote, “It is certainly true that hardly anything is missing from our churches these days, except the most important thing. We are missing genuine and sacred offering of ourselves and our worship to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The Holy Spirit is orchestrating a global prayer strategy far eclipsing any other prayer movement in history, resulting in an unprecedented Harvest of souls and completing the Great Commission.

In cities throughout the earth, it will become common to hear of “intercessory worship” ministries that continue non-stop 24 hours a day.

The Lord promised, “There’s coming a day,  in every place on the earth, incense shall be offered to His name, and a pure offering; for His name shall be great among the nations, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 1:11).”

The Importance of Prayer

Excerpted from Ron Beckham, Pastor

Sunday Sermon 7/22/01 The Joy of The Lord 1 John 5:14-15

In Matthew 9:37-38 Jesus connects missionary work with prayer. He says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborerers into His harvest.” This command always struck me as odd. If the laborers are few and there is much work to be done would it not make more sense to command His disciples to ‘go’ and ‘evangelize’ the unsaved people? Indeed, this is the very command He gives His disciples in the final chapter of this gospel (see Matthew 28:19-20). However, in this situation He gives them a very different command. He says, “pray.”

Historically, ‘prayer’ and ‘missions’ were one in the same. The famous missionaries of the past lived lives of personal prayer and devotion, while boldly standing for Christ through sacrificial service, and gospel proclamation. Many of them claimed that without a strong prayer-life their public ministry would have been far less fruitful.

In Luke 11 the disciples approached Jesus as He was praying and they interrupted Him saying, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Without a second thought, Jesus immediately goes into a teaching on prayer. He gives them the Lord’s prayer as a template for personal communion and intercession. In Luke 18 He continues to teach about prayer by telling the parable of the unjust judge and the persistent widow. Jesus summarizes His teaching with this phrase, “…Shall not God avenge His own elect who cry out day and night to Him, though He bears long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily…”

• We believe the most powerful means of impacting a culture and discipling new believers is through prayer. God, in His sovereignty has ordained prayer as a means of changing things in the physical earth. It reveals our utter dependence on Him, and it places Him squarely in the middle of all of our ministry initiatives. Therefore, as a missions organization, we are committed to praying day and night for the nation of Haiti. Our hope rests in God, and we believe He is going to move through our faith-filled prayers.

What if We Prayed With Confidence?

“Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us, and if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we asked of Him (1 John 5:14-15).”

Somehow, what we call “confidence” is bound up with “joy”. I think we can’t have the one without the other. When I told the computer to give a “thesaurus” definition of “confidence”, it surprised me by providing words like “faith,” along with “belief, trust (and) hope.” It suggests you have to have trust IN Someone, in order to feel and express the CONFIDENCE that is so attractive (but also so rare) in people.

For years, I wondered about George Mueller. This was a great, confident man of God, who lived and worked in His service, about 200 years ago. At a time when orphans were poorly treated just about everywhere, he cared for orphans. He took them in, fed them, provided for them, and was directly involved in the conversion to Christ of almost 3,000 orphans.

He never asked people for money, but instead prayed for every need. His meticulous records reveal that through answered prayer, he provided schooling for thousands of pupils, distributed 281,196 Bibles, and 1,448,662 New Testaments. This man, who had no resources except prayer, financially supported missionary operations in 26 countries. As stated earlier, for years, I wondered about this man, and during the same years, I met so MANY who were “Christians” but knew NOTHING of answered prayer. And I tended to be in the same “boat” myself.

There are many wonderful examples of answered prayer in George Mueller’s life, but the one I recall vividly is when he was on a ship bound for Canada, where he was to have an important speaking engagement. The ship was traveling very slow and he went to the captain, asking for more speed. “I have to get to Canada” (by a certain date). The captain responded, “It’s the fog… we cannot go any faster… we have safety to consider… we won’t get there on time,” etc.

Mr. Mueller immediately knelt in prayer in the captain’s cabin, and the captain knelt with him. The captain later said, “I never heard a prayer like that one – it was so clear and simple…” George Mueller just asked that the fog would lift and they would get to Canada on time. The captain started to pray also, but Mr. Mueller stopped him, with the words, “I believe, Captain; but you don’t.”

With that, he arose and left the cabin. Troubled, the captain also raised himself from the floor, and thoughtfully walked to the door. He opened it, and was startled – the dense fog was gone! George Mueller arrived in Canada, on time for his speaking engagement.

Have you experienced answered prayer? Most have few such experiences, and I suspect many are like the captain, who believed God is God and Christ is the Son of God, but his prayers were perfunctory, lacking the BELIEF demanded by the Word of God. I have been just as surprised by George Mueller as the captain was, but I have also been finding answered prayer, and I know this: answered prayer carries with it JOY in the Lord.

George Mueller’s own words reveal the HOW(?) of answered prayer. In an address to ministers and ministry workers after his ninetieth birthday, he said of himself:

“I was converted in November, 1825, but I only came into the full surrender of the heart four years later, in July, 1829. The love of money was gone, the love of place was gone, the love of position was gone, the love of worldly pleasures and engagements was gone. God, God alone became my portion. I found my all in Him; I wanted nothing else. And by the grace of God this has remained, and has made me a happy man, an exceedingly happy man, and it led me to care only about the things of God.”

He LOVED the Lord. He sought and worshiped his Christ, and the fact that he opened orphanages was not some kind of accident! He didn’t say, “What will I do with my life? – I know; I’ll open orphanages!” No, he sought the Lord Himself, and what he subsequently did was in response to the discovered will of God for His life.

1st John 5:14-15, says, “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us, and if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we asked of Him.”

He was precisely in the center of God’s will for his life. When George Mueller prayed for his orphans, he was asking for God’s will, for he KNEW caring for them was God’s call. That hope you have, to be a missionary, to distribute Bibles, to tell others about Christ, to comfort those who are in need — that CONCERN you have; the need to express SOMETHING in the lives of other people – may be precisely God’s will for your life. It was in his.

So he opened an orphanage, and then another, and another. He prayed for their needs, and he prayed WITH them for their needs. People sometimes don’t know what to pray for, but often the need is quite obvious. As for him, he had orphans. What do orphans need? Why, they need milk, they need food, they need to learn, they need clothing – and often, while still in prayer, the knock would literally come on the door, with exactly the answer that was required for the time.

A heart sold out to Christ. Not my needs but His. No longer annoyed by what I don’t have, but excited by what I have discovered is His call for my life. In the will of God, willing to pray; in fact, praying for the specifics of His will. And, He answers! Such CONFIDENCE. And then, of course, JOY in the Lord, as we see His will unfold.

What is prayer: Prayer is the process by which we humans communicate with God our Creator. Prayer is the primary way by which God’s will is released in the earth. The Lord’s model of prayer teaches us to pray, “His will be done on earth even as it is in heaven.”   John Wesley said, “It appears God will do nothing unless men pray (paraphrased).” This is a great mystery in God’s design and order. When we as Christians accept this mystery as reality, we are motivated to pray.

Our prayer room the Rock, is open 24 hours a day, 6 and half days a week, both the Rock House of prayer and the Bethel Prayer Mountain in Les Cayes Haiti are part of God’s great plan to fill the earth with His glory just before the imminent return of Christ our great and magnificent King.

Hosting the presence of the Lord through worship and prayer is and will always be our primary obligation at Bethel Mission Outreach. We believe prayer is the key to revival in Haiti and everywhere else in the world.  The Lord confirms this reality when He makes this declaration in Isaiah: On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have set watchmen; all the day and all the night they shall never be silent. You who put the Lord in remembrance, take no rest, and give him no rest until He establishes Jerusalem and makes it praise in the earth. The Lord promises to release speedily justice to those who cry out to Him day and night.