LET US PRAY
ARTICLE
A survey, several years ago, showed that the average minister set aside less than ten minutes a day for prayer. This is shocking when you consider that prayer should be the fire in every Christian’s heart. It is actually to be the “coal tender” which supplies the fuel to every minister’s ministry, the Spirit’s fire in his bones and power in his preaching. Every preacher should be fully convinced and truly appreciate that his praying is actually his preaching in incubation.
So, where is real prayer in the typical church today? Is it in the congregation’s life, the pastor’s prayer closet, in preaching? No, it isn’t. Everywhere we look, we see anemic churches and powerless preaching. There are churches of enormous size whose highly educated pastors can only deliver canned, mechanical, predictable messages with contentless drama, used to motivate flesh.
The flesh, whether with carnal Christians or lost church members, may be motivated to perform noble, good works, have emotions stimulated to excess, or most tragically, become vessels for foreign spirits masquerading as God’s Spirit.
A prayer-less pastor and congregation will be powerless. These may be congregations and pastors, who are religious but lost, saved but shallow and poorly grounded or actually deceived by foreign spirits which produce counterfeit experiences. Something the Bible calls “strange children.” (scrip. ref.)
Whatever the case, genuine believers in God’s true church need to cease robbing
their souls and the souls of others by diluted or deleted prayer.
If you ask church members today to describe biblical intercession or share their personal experiences of fasting and intercessory prayer, perhaps you will hear an honest reply “I don’t really know what intercession means.” But sadly, you will likely hear some kind of drivel being called intercessory prayer. Today, there is little to no understanding of intercession, as the old saints described as “praying through” or "standing in the gap”.
Let us no longer, during our one hour on stage, neglect what God highly values! Let us no longer relegate His precious privilege to pray to fewer than ten minutes a day. No more diluted drivel, no more canned messages, mechanically punctuated by deliberate but often meaningless inflections, no more Madison Avenue marketing messages, no more flag waving or apple pie messages, no more emotional tear jerkers to massage the soul, no more thumping with lifeless rhetoric to stimulate the mind, no more fascinating mental ascents to stimulate the psyche, no more off Broadway pulpit drama, no more comedian wannabe’s and definitely no more foreign spirits masquerading with counterfeit anointing. God, give us prayer incubated, prayer birthed messages, delivered by prayer drenched, Spirit filled old time Gospel preachers bringing the ALL time Gospel message that saved Peter and Paul’s souls—that same Jesus, coming the same way He came into your heart and saved your soul.