Pray for Ministry to Happen

Photo by Manoj Damodaran

Scripture: Luke 10:2

And He was saying to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.

Insights: The second principle for effective ministry that we learned about this week is our need to pray for ministry to happen. FBC Bowling Green was enlightened by David Platt regarding this verse. We learned several years ago through David's teaching that the Lord did not seem to be concerned about the lost world receiving Him, but was rather more concerned about the church world not going out to share the gospel. In other words, today's verse tells us the harvest field is plentiful. There are people all over the world desiring to receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior. The problem is we do not have enough people actually entering into the harvest field to work on reaping this harvest. As a result, Jesus tells us to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out harvest workers. It is as if God's greatest concern was that the church would grow content to sit and not serve. Unfortunately, as I have evaluated the state of the church in the United States, I think we have more sitters than servers. Out of this deep concern for workers Jesus gives us this second principle of prayer. If we are going to have any kind of success as laborers in the harvest field it is going to be precipitated by our amount of prayer. We must become men and women of prayer. Again, let me give you the mission statement for FBC Bowling Green: we are a church that is Christ centered, gospel driven, joyfully united and prayerfully obedient. In this verse as well as in our mission statement we see we are to be about prayer. Beloved, let me encourage you to form your own groups of prayer warriors. You do not have to just come together at our Wednesday night prayer meetings to be prayer warriors. You can form your own prayer warrior team. This team could actually meet together to pray or they could even use the telephone. The important thing is that we are praying. It is my prayer you will be a prayer warrior for the gospel.

Questions:

1. Do you actually pray for ministry opportunities?

2. Are you aware of God’s concern for the need of having more ministry workers?

Prayer: Father, forgive me when I don't obey You and do what You've command me to do. Increase my faith, O Lord, so that I might enter into the harvest field.  Amen.

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