Praying in the Face of the Pandemic

I wanted to share with you some thoughts from the scriptures to encourage you today. We are not even 24 hours into the "stay at home" order issued by our governor and I'm certain the confinement, though necessary, is already getting old.

While Psalm 91 is definitely a Psalm that is applicable to our current situation, I want to point you to one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament, 2 Chronicles 20:1-23. 

The passage opens with "after this." Of course, you have to read what was going on in 2 Chronicles 19:4-11 to get the full sense of what the "after this" is really all about. Essentially, Jehoshaphat, being a king who wanted to serve and honor God,  appointed judges throughout the land who would judge with righteous judgment. After making this change, both in service to God and to the people of his kingdom, Jehoshaphat was confronted by the unexpected. Three nations had gathered to come in and destroy Jehoshaphat and the southern Kingdom of Judah. 

The response of Jehoshaphat is seen In the text in chapter 20 and I think will help us understand what our response needs to be in the face of the unexpected. 

He Prayed 

What was his motivation for prayer? Two things:

• Fear - verse 3 says that Jehoshaphat was "alarmed" or also translated "fearful." This was not a fear that overtook him or overpowered him. He didn't allow fear to paralyze him. At that moment some things still hadn't come into view, specifically, the word of God that would be delivered to him later in this passage to encourage both Jehoshaphat and the people.

• Faith - Yes, it sounds contradictory that both fear and faith can be the motivators to pray, but the momentary fear he felt at the beginning of his trial moved him to pray in faith. In fact, his prayer, while it is a prayer for help, had very little to do with addressing his own feeling of fear and more to do with what God had done in the past, as well as trusting God for a future that was still unknown. 

Briefly, his prayer is one of the great prayers in the Bible for a few reasons:

• The beginning of his prayer focuses on how great and awesome God is.
• He is fully aware of the word that God gave in the past to preserve the very nations that are now coming to war against them.
• He trusts that God's word was true back then and therefore must be true today.
• He makes one of the greatest statements of faith when he says, "we don't know what to do, but our eyes are upon you." Faith does not ignore the problem, it simply focuses more sharply on the One who is the answer. 

We, our leaders, our scientists, and the medical community may not have an answer to the pandemic we are faced with right now in our world, but I want to leave you with this final word of encouragement to pray for an answer. Pray that God will stem the tide of sickness in our world. Pray that you will honor Him with your life in spite of the pain and suffering you see around you. 

Preaching and Prayer

My father, who has been with the Lord since 2006, was an old-time Pentecostal preacher, and never willing to apologize for that either. You had to know my Dad and know a little about him to appreciate how hard he worked at studying for his messages. He was not an orator, not smooth, but he was real. When he preached, you sensed that He had been with Jesus, because he actually had been with the Lord. I'm not sure what the ratio was of praying to studying, but as he poured over the books in his study, with notepad out and his fairly giant Dake's Annotated Study Bible open, I recall many times knocking on his door only to find him on his knees. For him, studying was something that he had to do to prepare his mind, while praying was something he had to do to prepare his heart. No matter what label you wear, Pentecostal, Baptist, Presbyterian or no label at all (since, in reality, the only label we see in the NT was "Christian"), can we really dispute the correlation between study and prayer for the purpose of being effective in our ministry to communicate the Word? I don't think so.

I once heard a preacher by the name of A.A. Ledford, someone my Dad and I admired, say, "Never go into the pulpit unprepared." I always thought he meant preparation as it relates to study, but as I've gotten older, I see that he really meant both study and prayer.

I wonder how many of us preachers and teachers, in the age of Powerpoint preparation, forget the importance and vitality of praying over what we have studied so that it would be communicated effectively, not based on our desire to impress, but based on our desire to see the Spirit of God accomplish something in the hearts of the listener. Prayer keeps this goal in focus. If we study and don't pray, we might fall into the trap of thinking that we are studying just to preach a "good" sermon. Yet, prayer keeps us close to the heart of God who desires to communicate His heart through your sermon preparation and delivery.

There were other times that I would be looking for my Dad before a service. I'd knock on the door to his office, but he wasn't there. At that point, I knew right where to find him. He could be found in the prayer room of the church asking the Lord to minister in a mighty way to the people. I recall the day I left for Bible college. My Dad, stood in our living room and said to me, "Brent, find the prayer room." His advice still rings in my ears. It wasn't, "Brent, find the library." Nor was it, "Brent, find this really great commentary set that I know will help you in your study of the Bible." It was, "find the prayer room."

I started out writing this blog post with the intention of sharing my perfect preaching solution, some of the tools of our age of technology that have been enormously helpful to me. However, as I began to remember my Dad's perfect preaching solution, it seemed so clear to me that it wasn't all the books on his bookshelves in his study; it was his dependence on the Holy Spirit as he bent his knee before the service to express his need for God to use him in that meeting.

Keeping Christ In...

Christmas is just a few hours away, but I wanted to share some thoughts about how we hear so much about Keeping Christ In Christmas.

At this season of the year, I hear many believers make an important statement - something like, "We need to keep Christ in Christmas." I completely agree. Unfortunately for many this tends to be a seasonal soapbox rather than a daily, year-round commitment to "contend for the faith." I don't know, maybe it's because we feel that the daily balance of greetings at this time of year tips the scale too far in the direction of Happy Holidays and not Merry Christmas. And, then there's the whole X-mas abbreviation that is completely annoying and yet in my humble opinion, totally powerless to stamp out the true meaning of Christmas. Jesus said, "I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it."

Keeping Christ in Christmas is not some kind of conservative political statement that absolutely must be made at this time every year just because we've heard some generic greeting too many times. Frankly, that idea is too small. Jesus didn't come into the world to create some subsection of a political party that would jump on a bandwagon of slogans at Christmastime. He came into the world to reach out with great love and compassion to the unbeliever (some of whom will claim to be offended at being wished a Merry Christmas). We who claim to be followers of Christ get offended at their offense and then start on a mission to somehow change it all. But when reading the Gospels, you will find that Jesus dealt with non-believers with grace while the "religious" crowd were often handed stinging rebukes for their outward piety and inward emptiness.

I don't think Jesus came into the world just to be at the center of Christmas. He came into the world to be the center of our lives every day of the year. After Christmas is over, are we keeping Christ in our New Year? We must pursue Him daily, not just at specific seasons of the year.

How do we accomplish this? Scripture always offers the best solution for us. The best way to keep Christ in Christmas is to keep Christ in our hearts and our daily lives through prayer. The greatest voice the Christian has is not at the polls or on some kind of soapbox at Christmas or any other significant Christian holiday, but the voice that James 5:16 says is "the prayer of the righteous" and that prayer is "powerful and effective." Keep Christ in... well, just keep Him in...everything!

From my heart to yours, Merry Christmas!

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