Adoration

Welcome to the Month of February!

    I want you to know this month that I am praying for you. You, who are willing to set aside time to pray for your pastors, who have made a commitment knowing it will be difficult to keep. Why should a few minutes a week be so hard? It sounds simple enough. But you and I know that the enemy will fight tooth and nail to keep you from this time of prayer. Not only does he want to keep us from praying for our pastors, knowing that prayer is powerful in the war between his kingdom and the Kingdom of Heaven, but he also wants to discourage you and convince you that you can't keep this commitment. The phone will ring. Your body will feel tired, sick, or in pain. The kids or neighbor or boss will suddenly need you. Do not be discouraged, my friends. We live with an eternal perspective, and a deep belief  in God's grace.
"Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ..."

Onward Christian soldiers
Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before!

With that said, let's get started...

The goal for Operation P4P is to spend time in focused, intentional prayer for our church pastoral team.  One way we can learn how to pray with intention for any subject is by using the common acronym ACTS, which stands for:

Adoration,
Confession,
Thanksgiving, and
Supplication.

This month, in honor of Valentine's Day, we will be looking at each of these four types of prayer through the lens of marriage, and what marriage can teach us about how to pray for our pastors. The Bible says, "For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church."  Eph. 5:31-32  Join me as we explore together this great mystery in praying for our pastors and churches.

POWER VERSE:
"Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. ..." Matt. 22:36-40

QUICK START PRAYER POINTS:
1. Pray that our pastors will not succumb to the temptation to let their love grow cold, and in so doing lead their congregation into "having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof". (2 Tim. 3:5)
2. Pray that our pastor's personal times with the Lord be intimate and powerful, filled to overflowing with love and adoration for their Savior and Creator as they spend time in His Presence.
3. Pray that this overflow of love and adoration will spill out into their preaching, teaching and worship ministries, inspiring their listeners to want that same level of intimacy, passion, and purpose.


FULL PRAYER GUIDE:

    What is the number one thing you use to evaluate a strong versus a weak marriage? I think most of us look to one thing: How much do they love each other?  We look at all kind of indicators to make our judgement. How do they look at each other? With adoration, ambivalence, or animosity? How do they serve each other? Is it done joyfully, out of habit, or only for appearances? How much time do they spend together? Do they go out of their way to be together in meaningful settings? How do they talk about one another? Is it obvious from your conversations that they think of one another often with fondness, rarely at all, or only as a perpetual proverbial punching bag?

It is no secret, and no mistake, that in both the Old and New Testaments, God the Father is seeking one kind of person: One who will love Him with all their heart and soul. This week's Power Verse sums it up for us. Just as the bedrock of any good marriage must be a passionate, committed love, so must it be in our relationships with the Lord. And just as the depth of our love determines the quality of our service to our spouse, so does the depth of our pastor's love for God determine how he or she will serve Him.  And as shepherds of their flock, it is often the depth of their love, for better or worse, that will be caught by their congregation. We, and unbelievers, watch them to gauge how much of our lives this love for God is really supposed to involve, and how we are supposed to act as somebody in love. If all ministry hinges on this one thing, then it follows that this must be our first and most important prayer for those who minister to us.

    Jay Knockenhauer, in a March 2014 article on ReformedWorship.org, said this: "Pray that becoming a professional at spiritual things does not drown out love and devotion and joy. That trafficking in holy things does not render them common.  Pray that your pastor takes down the oxygen mask first before helping you with yours." (www.reformedworship.org/article/march-2014/how-pray-your-pastor/)  Being in ministry takes time, and time is limited. The temptation to prioritize the never-ending task list of ministry before spending meaningful yet frustratingly "unproductive" time with God is a real one.

But what happens when this compromise is made, and a pastor doesn't spend time truly seeking the Lord? The prophet Jeremiah said this, "For the pastors are become brutish, and have not sought the Lord: therefore they shall not prosper, and all their flocks shall be scattered." (Jer. 10:21)  The word used here, "brutish", is from the Hebrew "baar", meaning senseless, stupid. Sometimes it is translated as "dull hearted". It is a verb derived from the word "beir", meaning beast or cattle.  It is our love for the Lord, our very ability to love Him, that gives us wisdom, and sets us apart from the beasts of the field.

When a pastor stops seeking Him, they become no better off than the beasts whose sole purpose is to labor from sunup to sundown to ensure survival. He becomes like an old man who has settled into the routine of the business of marriage and forgotten the purpose of it, which is to glorify God in his sacrificial love for his wife.  He loses sight of his higher purpose by losing sight of the object and origin of his love.  The result is failure in ministry, and ultimately the loss of precious sheep to that prowling lion who is always waiting in the shadows for leaders to fall. We must pray diligently that our pastors in every kind of ministry do not allow their ministry or anything else to overshadow their personal time with the Lord.  It is their personal edification as they spend time with our Heavenly Father that must be the wellspring of all their ministry activities.

    Pray, then, that when our pastors go into a place to pray and search out the scriptures, or choose worship songs, they are not just searching for something to share with those they minister to.  Pray that they are able to drown out the baaing of the sheep long enough to just simply spend time with the One their hearts desire. Pray that the Spirit of God will be poured out wherever our pastors find themselves. That the Presence of God in that place will fill them with such awe and reverence that they will be rendered speechless as new levels of comprehension of His glory fill their soul.

Dr. William Smith said in his 1901 Bible Dictionary that, "The highest form of adoration is that which is directed immediately to God Himself, His kingly attributes and spiritual excellencies being so apprehended by the soul that it is filled with rapture and praise, and is moved to do Him reverence. A classical instance is the vision that initiated Isaiah into the prophetic office, when he was so possessed with the sovereignty and sublimity of God that he was filled with wonder and self-abasement." (Isaiah 6:1-5).  (www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/adoration)  

May the wonder of His love fill them to overflowing! Pray like Paul in Ephesians 3:14-19,  "For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—  to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." In addition, may the power of His holiness bring them to beg for His purifying work in their lives. Pray that the consuming fire of the Lord's Spirit will burn away any chaff that is polluting the harvest, that the washing of the water of the Word will replace any wrong ways of thinking with truth, that the blood of Christ will wash every sinful stain that would come between our pastor's souls and their Savior. As we pray that they will be empowered and their hearts prepared by God Himself, then we can begin to pray for the work that they must actually do.

   Elizabeth George said, "It is as your soul is constantly dwelling on the God you love and serve and on His awesome, holy presence that your behavior will show forth your reverence for Him and evoke the same in others...Your state of worship causes others to think of God, too, and will move them to worship right along with you. In other words, they will not be able to be in your presence without thinking about God." (A Woman's High Calling, Pg. 24)  This is the kind of persons we want to be in places of leadership and ministry in our churches, is it not?  We can pray that anybody will be blessed in their personal devotions, but we pray this intentionally for our pastors because we know that they will fulfill God's calling on their lives in the highest degree when their ministry is simply an outpouring of the fullness of Christ already in them.

So pray that when our pastors preach, the enthusiasm for God's Word is not contrived, but deeply experienced and communicated in all sincerity, inspiring us to go home and dig in to the riches His Word contains for our lives.  Pray that when our children's ministers teach the next generation, they teach with real joy and a heartfelt relish of the goodness of God that quickens these precious little ones to want to know Him, too.  For our youth pastors, pray that their passion and zeal for the Lord will pour out on our teenagers in power, equipping them to go into their schools and take a strong stand for the Lord, no matter what.  Youth pastors, especially, need prayer that they will be real with their teens, who seem to have a special radar for insincerity and are turned off by it in a moment.  Worship leaders need deep, deep places to draw from as they seek to lead us into the very thing we are discussing: the intentional adoration with words of our Creator, King, Savior and Friend. Pray that our worship leaders will be so anointed in their practice times that when service time comes, their spirits will already be in such a state of worship that we, as a congregation, won't be able to help but follow them into the Presence of the Lord.  Every ministry needs the Spirit of God to breath life into the work of the Kingdom, and His life is transmitted through those He has called to serve.

    We all long to see revival in our churches, and our country.  Our hearts burn within us to see the Holy Presence of God changing lives for His glory. This is why we pray. God has placed those He has chosen in the roles He desires, in order to bring this about.  This is why we pray for them.  "But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him." (Jn. 4:23) God is seeking leaders who will worship Him, who will fall on their knees in adoration, filled with supernatural love.

 "...a deeper study of worship shows that it is more a thing of the heart and mind than a physical action or position. Jesus says worshippers worship Him in vain when "their heart is far from Me" (Matthew 15:8).  Perhaps we can say worship means having a bowed-down head and heart as we adore and revere our Maker! It is an attitude of totally and unconditionally surrendering to the One we call our Master, our Lord, our God." (www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Topical.show/RTD/CGG/ID/4781/Adoration)

 Pray that the hearts of our leaders will not be far from God, but closer than they have ever been. Then we will see the power of God flowing through them as never before in preaching, in teaching, and in worship.

Amen