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How Should Pastors Pray for Their Flocks? (John Owen) SERVE

John Owen summarizes the biblical ‘job-description’ of a pastor in chapter 5 of The True Nature of a Gospel Church. Among the duties of the pastor is prayer for those under his care. What then should his supplications in behalf of his flock regularly consist of?

He should pray, Owen says,

1. Unto the success of the [preached] word, unto all the blessed ends of it, among them…

2. Unto the temptations that the church is generally exposed unto. These vary greatly, according unto the outward circumstances of things…

3. Unto the especial state and condition of all the members, so far as it is known unto them…

4. Unto the presence of Christ in the assemblies of the church, with all the blessed evidences and testimonies of it…and they will do so who understand that all the success of their labours, and all the acceptance of the church with God in their duties, do depend hereon…

5. To their preservation in faith, love, and fruitfulness, with all the duties that belong unto them, etc.

(Works of John Owen, Vol. 16, p. 78).

If you change the order a bit, you could remember these points by the acronym SERVE

Pray for (1) their present
Situation or state, (2) that they would
Experience Christ’s presence, (3)
Receive the Word, (4) have
Victory over temptation, and (5) that they would
Endure to the end

I might also add that this is a helpful paradigm to use in praying for your own children as well. As a matter of fact, I may post separately to relate Owen’s points to parent-prayer.

He Presents Nothing but the Flowers (Prayer)

This quote relates to my recent post, God Fixes Our Prayers On the Way Up:

Christ’s prayer takes away the sins of our prayers. As a child, says Ambrose, that is willing to present his father with a posy, goes into the garden, and there gathers some flowers and some weeds together, but coming to his mother, she picks out the weeds and binds the flowers, and so it is presented to the father: thus when we have put up our prayers, Christ comes, and picks away the weeds, the sin our our prayer, and presents nothing but flowers to His Father, which are a sweet-smelling savour.

-Thomas Watson, All Things for Good, p. 23

“God Fixes Our Prayers On the Way Up”

As I have been engaged in studying Romans 8:26-27 over the better part of a month I have often found myself confused by the commentators trying to explain the ‘groanings’ of v. 26.

  • Romans 8:26 ¶ Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

However complex and beyond me the exact answer to the riddles may be, one truth stands out gloriously. As we pray, the Spirit helps in ways that we cannot comprehend.

In prayer our words, through the intercession of the Spirit, are, as it were, brought to the very ears of the Father. And he doesn’t always hear things the way we speak them. He hears them the way they should have been spoken, for in prayer not only do we speak to the Father by the Spirit, but the Spirit speaks to the Father through us and in our behalf.

A young man, a professing Christian, once came to me and confessed with great grief that he had not prayed in months. He simply didn’t know how to. His sins drove him away from prayer because he was ashamed. His inability to discern who God is, and what his will was for him at that particular time, drove him away. I saw a broken, confused young man who had forsaken the one thing he needed more than anything – communion with God through prayer.

Oh, what peace we often forfeit,
Oh, what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer!

The fact of the matter is that none of us really know how to pray. We have some sense of it, but we are always afraid that we are cut off from God on the one hand, or just getting it wrong on the other. That’s where the Spirit’s help comes in. I wish I could have shared this quote with that young man, but I had never read it. One of my pastors shared it years ago and I’ve always treasured it. In the book Praying: Finding our Way through Duty to Delight, by Carolyn Nystrom and J.I. Packer, Ms. Nystrom basically gives the best summary application of Romans 8:26 I have seen:

Some people get so entangled in the various dos and don’ts of prayer, so transfixed by the problem of sorting out what is our part and what is God’s part, so bogged down fretting over whether they, as mere flawed humans, should ask anything of a holy, almighty God, or conversely whether there is any point in asking since God will do what he wants anyway that they become paralyzed about praying…Don’t fret; just pray. God fixes our prayers on the way up! If he does not answer the prayer we made, he will answer the prayer we should have made. That is all anyone needs to know (pp. 174-175).

Don’t get into that position where you are paralyzed, like that young man, and you can’t pray. If you don’t have confidence in your own prayers, have confidence in the intercession of the Spirit. Have confidence that he will ‘fix your prayers on the way up.’ What greater comfort could he give us?

We have an advocate in heaven, Jesus Christ, our great Mediator; and we have an advocate on earth, yet more than on earth, dwelling within us, the Holy Spirit. We are covered from the bottom up. They are not speech writers always giving us the exact words to say. But they are editors presenting prayer to the Father as cleansed with the Savior’s blood and purified with the Spirit. Through the active obedience of Christ, we are counted as though we never uttered an imperfect prayer.

True prayers are like those carrier pigeons which find their way so well – they cannot fail to go to Heaven, for it is from heaven that they come – they are only going home! (Spurgeon, Hindrances to Prayer).

Calvin: Prayer for Promises and Presence

From the Institutes:

It is, therefore, by the benefit of prayer that we reach those riches which are laid up for us with the Heavenly Father…to us nothing is promised to be expected from the Lord, which we are not also bidden to ask of him in prayers. So true is it that we dig up by prayer the treasures that were pointed out by the Lord’s gospel, and which our faith has gazed upon.

In sort, it is by prayer that we call him to reveal himself as wholly present to us.

(Institutes III.X.2)

We reach, ask, dig up, call on him. He lays up treasure, promises, reveals his presence.

Prayer: Man Speaking to the Father by the Spirit, the Spirit Speaking to the Father through Man

Studying Romans 8, especially vv. 15 and 27, this passage from C.S. Lewis comes to mind.

From Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer:

I’ve just found in an old notebook a poem, with no author’s name attached…[it addresses] the haunting fear that there is no one listening, and that what we call prayer is soliloquy: someone talking to himself. This writer takes the bull by the horns and says in effect: ‘Very well, suppose it is,’ and gets a surprising result. here is the poem:

They tell me, Lord that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
since but one voice is heard, it’s all a dream,
One talker aping two.

Sometimes it is, yet not as they Conceive it. Rather, I
Seek in myself the things I hoped to say,
But lo!, my wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
the listener’s role and through
My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake
The thoughts I never knew…

Lewis comments,

But is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy? If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God.

Lewis knows that he might be charged with something like Pantheism for such a statement. But this is not Pantheism:

In Pantheism God is all. But the whole point of creation surely is that He was not content to be all. He intends to be ‘all in all.’

(from Letter 13)

  • Romans 8:15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”
  • Romans 8:26 ¶ Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. 27 And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

It is ‘by the Spirit’ that ‘we cry “Abba, Father!”‘ It is the Spirit working in us to inspire our ‘groans.’ In this prayer God is speaking to God (the Spirit to the Father) through the agency of man and man is speaking to God (the Father) through the agency of the Spirit.

In Tony Sargent’s book, The Sacred Anointing, he severally refers to the practice of ‘reading the mind of the Spirit‘ in prayer. This is what the Father does (according to Rom. 8:27). And in some sense it is what we are to be doing in prayer as well. Anyone who has often led corporate prayer has a sense of this – you struggle with the Holy Spirit concerning what needs to be said in prayer for a given congregation at a given time. You do not simply want to be praying your own fleshly desires. You want to pray the will of God and the promises of God that are applicable to a given situation. You are striving that the Spirit would speak to the Father through you and that you would speak to the Father through the Spirit. That is what Sargent calls ‘unction’ in prayer, and we should all strive for it.

  • 1 John 5:14 And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.

You get an inkling of this type of prayer in the book of Revelation. Eugene Peterson describes it:

At the end of the book he is still praying: ‘Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!’ (22:20). St. John listens to God, is silent before God, sings to God, asks questions of God. The listening and silence, the songs and questions are wonderfully in touch with reality, mixing the sights and sounds of Roman affairs with the sights and sounds of salvation – angels and markets and Caesars and Jesus…St. John lives on the boundary of the invisible world of the Holy Spirit and the visible world of Roman times. On that boundary he prays. The praying is a joining of realities, making a live connection between the place we find ourselves and the God who is finding us (The Contemplative Pastor, pp. 42-43).

Prayer, then, is making applications of the Scriptures to a given situation. It is reading the mind of the Spirit, revealed in Scripture, and applying it in a current context. It is the timeless Spirit speaking to the timeless Father concerning time. It is right now man, in his right now world, speaking the timeless Spirit’s timely word to the Father.

God Have Mercy On The Backslider

Something my friend Timothy (visit his blog HERE) wrote on Facebook, about how we should pray for those who have fallen away from the Lord, got me thinking. I remembered something I had read a long time ago. I couldn’t remember where I had read it, but the story has always remained with me. So I did some digging and found it.

The story is told in the context of the ‘romance’ of preaching – the fact that you never know what is going to happen when you step foot into a pulpit. But the principle is much broader – it is the romance of prayer in general. It is an illustration of how prayers can be answered in ways that we never imagined. The story has always encouraged me.

I knew a poor man who had been converted from a terrible life and sin and who had become a fine Christian. That we when I was in South Wales. But, afterwards, unfortunately, for various reasons this poor fellow had become a backslider and had fallen very deeply into sin. He had run away from his wife and children to live with another woman of a very poor type. They had come to London and there they had lived in sin. He had squandered his money, and he had actually gone home and told his wife a life in order to get further money out of her. The house in which they lived was in their joint names, but he got this changed and put into his name. Then he sold it in order to get the money. He had thus gone very very far into the ‘far country’, he had sinned terribly.   But now the money had finished and the woman had deserted him. He was so utterly miserable and ashamed that he had solemnly decided to commit suicide, feeling that in his deep state of repentance God would forgive him. But he could not forgive himself, and he felt that he had no right ever to approach his family again. So he solemnly decided to walk to Westminster Bridge and throw himself into the Thames. He was actually on the way to do this. Just as the poor soul arrived at the bridge, Big Ben struck half-past-six – six-thirty. Suddenly a thought flashed into his mind and he said to himself, ‘He (referring to me) will now be just entering his pulpit for his evening service.’ So he decided that he would come and listen to me once more before he put an end to his life. He made his way to Westminster Chapel in about six minutes, got through the front door, walked up the stairs and was just entering the gallery when he heard these words, ‘God have mercy on the backslider.’ I uttered that petition in my prayer and they were literally the first words he heard. Everything was put right immediately…and he was restored… (Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, pp. 302-303).

In hearing that prayer, the man heard precisely what he needed to hear, and God was pleased to grant the petition. And it is the reason why I often pray for backsliders in general, ‘God have mercy on the backslider.’

  • Jeremiah 3:22 ‘Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings.’ Behold, we come unto thee; for thou art the LORD our God.