Pray 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
Here are the four additional ways you can pray for your shepherd. If you missed yesterday, go back and read the first three:
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.
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.
I want to encourage you to take up the challenge. Start with just a day, and then may add another – but pray for your Pastor and other church staff members. Who knows – revival might break out – and my guess is this – it will start with YOU. – Bill Welte is President and CEO of America’s Keswick
Team YOU: Exodus 25-26; Proverbs 31; Matthew 20:17-34
Motivations: I prayed for Faith, and I thought that someday Faith would come down and strike me like lightning. But Faith did not seem to come. One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, "Now Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God"...I had closed my Bible, and prayed for Faith. I now opened my Bible, and began to study, and Faith has been growing ever since. Dwight L Moody
Practice to Remember: Level 1: Ephesians 2:10; Level 2: Ephesians 2:11-18
Powered Up: The mightier any is in the Word, the more mighty he will be in prayer. William Gurnall
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