One day my husband walked out to the mailbox and retrieved a card addressed to me. The return address was unfamiliar, as was the sender. It’s always fun getting mail, but receiving a card from a stranger was intriguing! As I opened the envelope and pulled the card from its place, I found a note from a sweet woman who had been listening to both my radio broadcast, and now my podcast. She wrote to tell me how this particular ministry had helped her. You cannot imagine the encouragement that was to my heart. You see, there’s really no feedback from a podcast as there is a blog where someone could leave a comment, and to be honest, I had gotten a bit discouraged.
“Was the time and effort I was pouring into this podcast really beneficial?” I asked myself.
God knew my thoughts, doubts and questions, so he burdened a dear woman to write to me. To get a note from a “real, live person” was the gentle reminder that my heart needed that this ministry was God’s plan. He had ordained it, and He was using it in some way to encourage others.
That was several months ago. My new friend and I had some contact via Facebook messenger, and she suggested we get together and meet over coffee at a nearby coffee house.
When you think of your energy level on Sunday evening after a day of being in God’s house, where would you rank it? A 2 or 3? Yeah, It thought so. There’s a good reason for that, and its has to do with more than wrestling the patent leather shoes onto a three year-old.
Every Sunday when you get yourself (and perhaps your family) ready and head out the door to worship, you are doing battle – a spiritual one. Satan doesn’t want you there where you’ll hear the Word of God. He doesn’t want your marriage strengthened and your children in a place where they’ll be taught Truth from the Bible, and so he fights us. Attitudes get out of whack, you fight to concentrate on the messages, your children are the crankiest on that day. By the end of the Sunday services, we’ve done real battle with the enemy – and it’s exhausting!
If the believer in the pew is fighting a spiritual battle, imagine what your pastor is facing as he endeavors to stand in the pulpit and preach the Word of God! He sees people nodding off, passing notes, flipping through their phones, or looking uninterested, and the devil plants seeds of discouragement in him. He fights with just wanting to sit down and quit. He struggles to remember passages of Scripture or the next illustration. The power point is almost sure to fail during his most important point – even though he spent much time and effort putting it together to aid the preaching of the Word.
It’s for all these reasons and many more that every pastor desperately needs the prayer of the saints. I’ve made a list of some of my favorite passages of Scripture to pray for my husband or whoever will be in the pulpit at our church. Here are the verses I like to pray, with a brief description:
After you spend some time praying through some passages of Scripture for your pastor, why not write him a note or send a text and let him know that you’ve prayed specifically for his preaching? It’s sure to refresh him and encourage him as he heads to the pulpit to deliver God’s Word.
Will you pray for your pastor and then let him know?
RefreshHer 