Praying for Your Shepherd (Part 2)

Praying for Your Shepherd (Part 2)

"To speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people." Titus 3:2

We have been unpacking this little but powerful verse from Titus 3. Yesterday I shared with you three ways to pray for your shepherd (Pastor). These are not mine, but come from Pastor Mark Driscoll in a new book by John Piper -- The Power of Words and The Wonder of God (Crossway).

Here are three additional ways to pray for your shepherd, rather than criticize him:

4. Pray that your shepherd would have a tender heart. One of the primary duties of a shepherd is to see and deal with sin, folly, and horror in the lives of people they love. It is brutal. If you are not a shepherd, imagine spending much of every week visiting the sick and dying in the hospital, preaching funerals, mending the broken marriages, serving addicts of various ills, and weeping with victims of molestation and rape. The needs are overwhelming, the shepherd feels woefully unfit for the work, and there is no end in sight. Pray that his heart would remain tender toward God and his flock, because that requires a miracle of grace.

5. Pray that your shepherd would have a humble disposition. Simply put, pride is the root that nourished the fruit of all sin and is akin to picking a fight with God. But God promises to give grace to the humble. Nothing breaks a church like pride, and nothing builds it like humility. Jesus the Chief Shepherd is the most perfectly humble person who has or will ever live ...

Without this humility, a proud shepherd contributes to a church culture of rivalry, conceit, competition, and selfish ambition, and a lack of teachability, submission to godly authority, and repentance.

Pray that as a result of humility he would follow the truth wherever it leads, invite and pursue correction from fellow shepherds, have the courage to lead boldly despite the personal cost, learn from everyone, repent quickly and thoroughly, seek and celebrate God's grace at work in the lives of other Christians and churches, have a spirit of thankfulness, listen to Scripture more than himself, and sleep like a Calvinist, even if he is Armenian!!!

6. Pray that your shepherd would have a supportive family. Between the accusations of Satan, stings of critics, and discouraging awareness of his personal shortcomings and inadequacies, a shepherd is greatly served by an encouraging wife and a home in which the Holy Spirit's work is evident. Pray for the shepherd's wife, because she is often put under great demands to be friends with women in the church she does not enjoy, reveal details from her personal life with people she does not trust, attend parties with people she does not know, share her marriage and family with people she does not feel appreciated by, endure gossip from people she has not met, and lovingly serve people who are not thankful.

Pray for the shepherds children. If they are struggling with sin and faith, there is great pressure to hide it so that their father retains the respect of the sheep and so that the swine do not have an opportunity to gloat and call their father a hypocrite, the wolves do not have an opportunity to attack their father, and the dogs do not have an opportunity to bark at their father.

7. Pray that your shepherd would have an evangelistic devotion. People are dying and going to hell without Jesus. It is easy in light of the needs of the sheep, folly of the swine, dangers of the wolves, and threats of the dogs for the shepherd to become so consumed with his flock that he does not seek the conversion of lost people.

Pray for your shepherd that he would have a heart for lost people and make time in his schedule to labor for their salvation.

Over the years people have come to me to seek advice about their church and Pastor. I was thinking yesterday and today -- the best way to see change in your church is " to speak evil of no one." The only way to facilitate REAL change is to pray. But be careful -- in the process, HE might want to change YOU! -- Bill Welte is President and CEO of America's KESWICK

Your feedback is a great encouragement. If Freedom Fighter is ministering to you, take some time to write us.

God's WORD for YOU: Proverbs 14; Isaiah 43-44; 1 Thessalonians 2

Great Quote: The remaining presence of sin in our lives means that we sometimes find it difficult to receive the teaching of God's WORD. We would do well, then, to do everything we can to prepare for the authoritative teaching and preaching of Scripture. We can pray that the Lord would make our hearts receptive to HIS message. We can study the Bible in order that we might recognize aberrant teaching. (Table Talk Magazine --October 2009)