Praying As Jesus Did For God's Agenda And God's Workers

 We come together for just a few minutes to pray each day.  I do hope that these moments encourage You to spend time on Your own with God, reading His Word, asking Him to highlight what is appropriate for You in Your circumstances and then offering Your life to live for Him and His good purposes.

We won’t come near to the time Jesus spent in prayer with His Father.  The Bible tells us:

During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.  Hebrews 5:7

Morning, night, and in between we find Jesus so often praying don’t we. 

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.  Mark 1:35

After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone.  Matthew 14:23

It happened that while Jesus was praying in a certain place, after He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John also taught his disciples.”  Luke 11:1

Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles:    Luke 6:12-13

And then there is this occasion where after Jesus spent all night praying that we seem to learn the reason why.  He’s about to choose folks to walk with Him, to train them and send them out in His name to carry His agenda forward.  Somehow Jesus must have known the challenges that weak humans would feel as they were confronted with the cost of this invitation – a cost of following God no matter what; a cost of doing it together with other frail and faulty human beings.  Jesus believed it was worth a night of prayer in order to hear God’s heart and get it right. 

Well, Heavenly Father, what greater example of prayer do we have than the Lord Jesus who offered up prayers – fervent prayers with tears to You who alone can save.  Help us to become praying people whose hearts are so touched with concern and compassion for those who are suffering and dying and particularly those who are going out into a lost eternity without God.  Oh Lord, help us to see beyond the limited self-focus we so often have of “me and mine” and to spend time finding Your heart and hearing clearly what You are showing us to be about today. 

We know that You felt it important to have others with You and to carry on the Father’s work and to get the right ones.  You chose 12 and later 72 to go out in Your name and do the Father’s work. 

Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”  Luke 9:37-38

The harvest is no less plentiful today and the workers are just as few.  And so today we also pray that You would send out workers into Your harvest field.  Help us to prayerfully pay attention to anyone You want us to call alongside us to work together, to learn from, to mentor, to support, to encourage. 

Your church is the first example of all this to me when we pray for:

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.   Ephesians 4:11-12

We pray today for pastors and teachers and evangelists already engage in the task as well as others You will call to.  Bless them and make their ministry fruitful, we pray.

But today, our prayer is that we would pray and continue to pray.  We fall short but we want to increase as we grow to love You more and seek to serve You well. 

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened  Matthew 7:7-8

Let’s finish today with the prayer Jesus taught the disciples when they asked Him to teach them to pray:

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name.  Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.  And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.  For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.  Amen