Sunday night – 2 April – 6:30-7:30pm @ OCC
Join us as we pray.
We are in spiritual warfare, and in a war, if a soldier or officer disobeys an order from a superior, that person will be punished.
We need to take prayer for workers seriously.
Why?
Because we have “marching orders” from our supreme commander.
The prayer step is critical because prayer is one of the most powerful weapons that God has given to his church.
Satan knows this truth better than we do and it seems that he regularly always attacks when we are praying.
How does he do it?
One of his favourite tactics is to try to distort who Jesus is and our dependence on him.
Satan tries to get us to stop depending on Christ.
We begin to allow the “selfish I,” which is always on the lookout, to occupy –even if it is for a short time –the place of command and control.
When the believer allows Christ to be displaced from his central place, the objectives that are united to the Lord—
prayer,
the salvation of souls,
witness, and evangelizing the world
are also weakened.
Then prayer,
instead of being used to conquer, advance, & extend the Kingdom,
becomes egocentric,
and very soon, the requests we pray for refer only to our own needs.
Many churches hold prayer meetings to only pray for their own needs:
“my person,”
my work,
my illness,
my family,
my mother-in-law, etc.
And what James 4.2-3 says is fulfilled:
“You ask with wrong motivations, to enhance your pleasures” (or personal interests).
Prayers for the extension of the Kingdom—for the sending of workers, that is, for the interests of the Lord—often occupies the last place.
The Lord never asked his followers to do what he did not practice.
“In those days he went to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night praying to God.
And when he went by day, he called his disciples, and he took twelve of them, whom he also called apostles ” Luke 6.12-13.
Jesus prayed and asked for workers.
Prayer is essential gear in God’s action & providence.
We won’t necessarily know how or when it works, but we know that it works and is essential.
When the disciples got up in the morning, and Jesus was not with them, they knew where to find him:
“in a deserted place, and there he prayed” Mark 1.35.
Are we following the example of Jesus
when we pray?
Let’s pray for unreached people,
and the workers needed to finish the task.
Praying for the unreached will keep us focused on his desire that “the gospel is preached to every people and nation” Matthew 24.14.