The Praying Pastor: Infectious Prayer (PT 1)

One of the moments that shaped our church most in the last two years was God’s post-Covid provision. Displaced from our fifteen-year, central-Chicago meeting spot in an expansive French Renaissance Cathedral we suddenly felt like orphans. We bounced between Chicago’s Hotel Sofitel and Swiss Hotel for almost two years.

In faith we did our best to buy the Cathedral to secure a long-term location. But God had other plans. We were bidding against a billionaire. I'll let you guess who won. 

So, we asked our congregation to pray. And pray they did. Our backs were up against a wall. Through nothing less than a miraculous provision, the Lord led us to a space that far exceeded our expectations. 

We like to think of COVID as being contagious, but in that season, prayer became contagious. The invisible God made himself visible not just by calling us to prayer, but by providing for us.

There hardly could be a topic more important than The Praying Pastor. Paul writes, “Pray without ceasing.” Yet my title seems to imply there might be another kind of pastor: an unpraying pastor or a prayerless pastor. But a pastor without prayer is a sailor without a sea. A soldier without weapons, a chef who can’t taste. 

C.H. Spurgeon puts it this way, “Of course the preacher is above all others distinguished as a man of prayer. He prays as an ordinary Christian, else he were a hypocrite. He prays more than ordinary Christians, else he were disqualified for the office which he has undertaken.” Prayer is our breath.

But more than this, pastors have the extraordinary opportunity to help shape a whole congregation who find prayer as their breath. Prayer is how we breathe in the Spirit of Christ. 

The Lebanese Christian and diplomat Charles Malik once remarked, “Jesus Christ is my Lord and God and Savior and song day and night. I can live without food, without drink, without sleep, without air -- but I cannot live without Jesus.” We need Christ beyond our imaginations.

If God has called you as a pastor, you have the remarkable privilege to help fill the lungs of your congregation with infectious prayer. 

How? Four principles and then some notes on practice. 

THE PRIVILEGE OF A PRAYING PASTOR

The first principle that must shape the life of the praying pastor and then of the congregation is simple: Prayer is a privilege. Yes, a duty, but only a duty as eating a bone-in-ribeye steak, watching a sunset, listening to soul-enriching music or laughing with friends. Drawing your next breath can hardly be called a duty. These are privileges. The steak strengthens you. The sunset moves you. Friends and music deepen you. 

Friends, we have a divine calling to shape God’s people into the image of Christ. We cannot do that without prayer! We have access to the King of Kings, the Creator of the World and our Heavenly Father! To be pounded on the anvil of his holiness, shaped into a tool he can use. 

I have found that almost always when the topic of prayer is mentioned in a local church the first reaction is a deflated, “I don’t pray enough.” Perhaps.

But why not see it as a privilege that fills us?!

Bill Thrasher in his book, Journey to Victorious Praying, writes that he struggled in prayer when he viewed God through the glasses of his guilty conscience rather than through the lens of the finished work of Christ. Christ has bought us. He has given us his Spirit. He has conquered our conscience and our sin!

Prayer is a privilege because it makes the invisible character of God visible. 

Edith Schaeffer tells about the founding of their evangelistic ministry in the mountains of Huemoz, Switzerland called L’Abri (the Shelter). Describing the first step of faith that led to the mission, she marvels at their dependence on prayer. “As Fran and I mailed that letter resigning from our mission board in early June 1955, we looked at each other with a measure of dismay! In the letter we said we were going to live by prayer. We wanted to demonstrate God's existence, not only by showing the logic of truth being true, but also by his provision in the simple and observable things of everyday life.” This is, in part, what an unbelieving world needs. To see genuine dependence on God in prayer. 

R.C. Sproul speaks also of this chance to depend on the unseen Christ. “The lordship of Jesus is not simply a hope of Christians that someday might be realized; it is a truth that has already taken place. It is the task of the church to bear witness to that invisible kingdom, or as Calvin put it, ‘it is the task of the church to make the invisible kingdom of Christ visible.’” Prayer is a privilege. 

THE PERSPECTIVE OF A PRAYING PASTOR

The conviction that prayer is a privilege arises from a second conviction. It arises from the perspective that we have a massive, all hearing, gracious God, powerful enough to answer, delighting to meet us in our closet and hear our prayers, available to us moment by moment. To a large degree the vitality of our congregation’s culture of prayer is drawn from the vision of the immensity of God’s grace and holiness and kindness and power of our God. 

God is available.

Your perspective on God shapes how you pray. The cross is the center of God’s redemption of us. But he redeems us to set us free. He anoints us by the power of the Spirit. He commissions us to do his work. He is our help!

What does Psalm 121 say? “I lift up my eyes to the hills, where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” As Spurgeon said, “Prayer moves the arm that moves the world.”

Prayer is a privilege. Our perspective on prayer before a massive, all-hearing God shapes the church’s culture of prayer. You can feel it saturating the church. 

Let’s not despair that we ‘don’t pray enough.’ Let’s embrace the privilege of prayer. Let’s shape our perspective on prayer with a vast vision of a seeing, hearing God who loves to listen to his children.

— Jon Dennis, Chair & Lead for Vision