Worship and prayer through the night hours keeps the fire of adoration burning to change the spiritual atmosphere over our city.
The Night Watch at WSC covers the hours from midnight to 6am. As we seek to follow the Lord’s call “to be, build and become a house of prayer” the Lord began with a call for WSC “to stand on the wall with other believers in the watch night.”
At the beginning of the New Year 2019, the Lord called us to this ministry of prayer in the watch night. Since then, we have resolved to be a committed group of people laboring through the night hours with the Lord. We believe the Lord is raising up many other communities of faith to join us in the night watch. We ask you to consider joining us in this mission of serving the Lord in prayer in the Night Watch.
Currently, the Lord has asked WSC to focus our attention together with one night per week: Thursday from 12a.m – 6a.m. We share the NightWatch in one to two hour shifts in our individual homes.
The Night Watch mandate, with a special blessing, is found in Psalm 134: “Behold, bless the Lord, all you servants of the Lord, who by night stand in the house of the Lord! Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the Lord. The Lord who made heaven and earth bless you from Zion!” We receive the blessing that the Lord promises those who stand in His house through the night.
The call to the NightWatch is a call to extravagant devotion. It is the Lord’s desire to raise up a people who will love Him in the night. On the night of Jesus’ betrayal, the hour of judgment and salvation, He found no one to stand with Him. But in the final hours of history—the time of escalated judgment and salvation—who will tarry with Him through the night?
The NightWatch is a unique context for prayer which facilitates a lifestyle of voluntary weakness. By its very nature, the NightWatch creates the opportunity to engage with the Lord in a focused way by limiting distractions and extracurricular activity.
The NightWatch calls for a lifestyle change that some see as a type of fast.
“Behold, bless the LORD . . . by night” is a call to a contemplative lifestyle in which we spend our lives before the Lord (Ps. 134:1; Lk. 10:42). By contemplative lifestyle we mean deep communion with God. Just like everything else in the kingdom, our first call in the NightWatch is to love the Lord. He is calling us to the “one thing needed”—the primary thing. Deep communion with God is to be our preoccupation in the night, whether in worship, intercession, or service.
There are three “one thing” passages found in Scripture.
King David was a man of “one thing” (Ps. 27:4). Around 1000 BC, as an outflow of his heart, he commanded that the ark of the covenant be brought up on the shoulders of the Levites amidst the sound of songs and musical instruments to his new capital, Jerusalem. There he had it placed in a tent and appointed 288 prophetic singers and 4,000 musicians to minister before the Lord, “to make petition, to give thanks and to praise the Lord” day and night [...]
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