Dear Person Who Is Ministering:
You who may be a woman or a man. You who may be
working as a professional in ministry work or you who earn a living in some
other form and simple strive to show Jesus to those around you in your everyday
life:
Are you praying? No, seriously. (Don’t you scoff at me) I
know…we are Jesus-followers; Christians. It feels like a given. But, are you prayerfully
praying? Are you praying only for your dinner, saying cute things like “Rub a
dub dub, thanks for the grub”? Simply typing “Praying” after a social media
status update, and possible forgetting later to actually pray for them? Spending
a few minutes with your kids before bed praying? Praying that the people with
the “Need Gas” sign on the side of the road would find help…from someone else?
I am.
Are you tired? If you’re anything like me, “I’m tired” is
among the top responses I hear when I ask others how they are doing. We’re busy
people. If you find yourself employed into a place of ministry, like I do, church
can become work. Things to do. Lessons or sermons to plan. Crafts to create or
worship services to coordinate. Books to
study and sermons to write. Curriculum to organize and volunteers to locate. Trying
hard to meet expectations for events, sermons, or programs. And even if you
aren’t a professional person of ministry, in our daily lives, as we try to live
like Jesus, we could get caught up in the details, the mundane that has to be
done. Possibly even losing our fire and forgetting to fix our eyes on Jesus. Are
you tired?
Because I am.
I can tell you, despite being four chapters into a book that
challenges me in how to pray and warns about the lack of prayer, I’m not prayerfully
praying and I am tired. “Even sermon-making, incessant and taxing as an art, as
a duty, as a work, or as a pleasure, will engross and harden, will estrange the
heart, by neglect of prayer, from God.” EM Bounds warns that we can get so
caught up in the work of everything, whether it be a sermon, another church
program, or our day-to-day happenings, that without prayer, we can become isolated
and hardened without prayer.
I LOVE the following paragraph: “Prayer freshens the heart
of the preacher, keeps it in tune with God and in sympathy with the people,
lifts his ministry out of the chilly air of profession, fructifies routine and
moves every wheel with the facility and power of a divine unction.” *DEEP
BREATH AND SIGH*!!!
Prayer refreshes. Prayer ignites. Prayer moves. Prayer helps
us stay connected to God to bear His fruit AND (let’s be real here) helps us
deal with people like Jesus would have us to!
I used to teach a classroom of kids on Sunday mornings. They
were adorable (usually) and so fun (usually). The lesson was provided for me,
the supplies were all there each Sunday, and I pretty much had to show up, love
on kids, put to use some teaching skills I’d learned along the way in my teacher’s
education program, and have fun. And I did. I LOVED working with the kids and
seeing them come closer to Jesus. I loved praying with them and for them. I
loved playing games to help them memorize verses and apply the lessons key
points. However, after a while, I felt empty. I felt tired. I felt “engrossed
and hardened,” “estranged,” like I was fulfilling a duty or working. I felt
this way because I was not connected to God. I was neglecting myself from Him
by only showing up to teach. I wasn’t even staying for a service so I could
hear from Him in a sermon. Much less was I abiding with Him through prayer; the
prayer that could refresh and ignite me.
Let’s consider this: “The praying which makes a prayerful
ministry is not a little praying put in as we put flavor to give it a pleasant
smack, but the praying must be in the body, and form the blood and bones.” (EM
Bounds p 15) Bounds puts it clearly in this chapter that prayer must come
first. Work, duty and activity come second. Prayer is the “blood and bones,”
the foundation; nothing good can come of our ministry if we don’t pray first. He
says “prayer is not petty duty; put into a corner; no piecemeal performance
made out of fragments of time which have been snatched from business and other
engagements of life; but it means that the best of our time, the heart of our
time and strength must be given.” I hear God calling me and saying that He
doesn’t just want my few minutes of “Please help this person” or “Thank you for
this food.” Sure, these prayers have their place. But if that is the ONLY
pieces of my life that I am giving Him, I am missing out. Seeking Jesus in
prayer mainly, deeply and firstly is a must.
May you be spurred on by this, as I was: “Prayer is not a
little habit pinned on to us while we were tied to our mother’s apron strings;
neither is it a little decent quarter of a minute’s grace said over an hour’s
dinner, but it is a most serious work of our most serious years. It engages
more of time and appetite than our longest dinings or richest feasts…” “The
character of our praying will determine the character of our preaching.” The
way we live this out to others, in a sermon or at work, in a kids’ lesson or at
the grocery store, is highly correlated to the time we spend in prayer.
Dear, person who is ministering, may we be refreshed and
ignited because we did the work from a place of prayerful living. May we not be
caught up in the work and duty of it all. May we not be tired any more. May we
spend our LIVES in prayer; connected fully to the God who loves us and wants to
be with us. May we, then and only then, minister to those around us out of that
prayerful life.
Sincerely,
A Person Who Is Ministering
No comments:
Post a Comment