The first meeting for prayer which we find after our Lord’s ascension to heaven is the one mentioned in the text, and we are led from it to remark that united prayer is the comfort of a disconsolate church. Can you judge of the sorrow which filled the hearts of the disciples when their Lord was gone from them? They were an army without a leader, a flock without a shepherd, a family without a head. Exposed to innumerable trials, the strong, brazen wall of his presence, which had been round about them, was now withdrawn. In the deep desolation of their spirits they resorted to prayer. They were like a flock of sheep that will huddle together in a storm, or come closer each to its fellow when they hear the sound of the wolf. Poor defenceless creatures as they were, they yet loved to come together, and would die together if need were. They felt that nothing made them so happy, nothing so emboldened them, nothing so strengthened them to bear their daily difficulties as to draw near to God in common supplication. Beloved, let every church learn the value of its prayer-meetings in its dark hour. When the pastor is dead, and when it has been difficult to find a suitable successor; when, it may be, there are rents and divisions; when death falls upon honoured members, when poverty comes in, when there is a spiritual dearth, when the Holy Ghost appears to have withdrawn himself—there is but one remedy for these and a thousand other evils, and that one remedy is contained in this short sentence, “Let us pray.” Those churches which are now writing “Ichabod” on their walls, and who sorrowfully confess that the congregation is slowly dwindling, might soon restore their numbers if they did but know how to pray.