I.　To be rich in the leadership requires willingness, emptiness, and continuous prayer to be filled with the Spirit of God:

A.　If we do not have a heart to seek after the Lord's mind, to pick up the burden for the church life, God has no way to initiate anything with us—John 2:17; 2 Cor. 11:28-29; 12:15.

B.　To empty ourselves means to have an absolute openness to God so that we can be filled with the Triune God as the filling Spirit—Matt. 5:3; Eph. 5:18; Luke 1:53:

1.　We need to be unloaded of our natural capability, knowledge, wisdom, and education; even real experiences of the church life have to be emptied out.

2.　Whether the church is living and fresh and enriched depends on this one thing: that we are being filled continuously with the Triune God.

C.　When we realize that whatever the old man can do is condemned by God, we shall see our need of God and will pray constantly and instantly:

1.　All the time, unceasingly, we should pray to be filled with Him; then we will be under the flooding of divine wisdom, divine understanding, and divine knowledge for the building up of the organic Body of Christ—1 Thes. 5:17; Eph. 6:18.

2.　The crucial lack is this continuous prayer on the part of all the leading ones; we are short of prayer, so we are short of the Spirit—Col. 4:2.

II.　The book of Acts is a record of the activities of the apostles, and the apostles' activities were always matched by their prayers; the apostles never initiated work without prayer:

A.　The prayer that we need is the prayer that brought in the outpouring of the Spirit—Acts 1:14; 2:1-4, 16-17a.

B.　We also need the prayer that shook the earth and empowered the disciples with the Holy Spirit for the speaking of the word of God with boldness—Acts 4:24-31.

C.　We need to continue steadfastly in prayer and the ministry of the word—Acts 6:4.

D.　We need to pray ourselves into a trance, which means to pray ourselves out of the imprisonment of the self into a conversation with the Lord to receive visions of God and commissions from God—Acts 10:9-16; 22:17-21.

E.　We need the kind of prayer that opened the prison gate for Peter, which is the fervent prayer of the church in small groups—Acts 12:4-15.

F.　For the organic building up of the Body of Christ, we need the prayer that brought the five prophets and teachers into the Lord's commission—Acts 13:1-4.

G.　We need the kind of prayer that brought in a great earthquake and shook the foundation of the prison—Acts 16:23-26.