We have prayer on Tuesday evenings. We pray for our country, for revival, for specific needs of specific people. We pray as the Spirit of the LORD leads. Last Tuesday, I listened as others prayed for me, for my specific health needs and for me as a pastor. May I say, that is a humbling experience.
I appreciated the prayer for my physical needs as I had just come from the doctor and had more questions than before I went. But on Tuesday they also prayed for me as their pastor, that I would have illumination of the Scriptures and hear and know the direction God wants our church to go, what messages for growth He wants brought. That was what humbled me.
It is an awesome and humbling responsibility to pastor a church, to know that you must hear what the Spirit is saying to the church today. It often takes my breath away to understand that spiritual growth for a congregation depends in part upon what I minister from behind the pulpit, and what I exhibit in my lifestyle in front of it.
Yes, I know we are all responsible for our own spiritual growth, but a pastor has so much influence to lead in a wrong direction. My greatest fear is to one day stand before the LORD our God, our Maker, and hear someone say that I led them down a wrong path, or I failed to warn them or tell them of the ways of the LORD.
To hear the prayer on Tuesday went straight to my heart. When Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15 that he was the least of the apostles and didn’t deserve that honor because he had persecuted the church, he also made a comment about what he and others preached … “this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.” [v11]
And that expresses exactly why this is so humbling … what we preach is what others believe. As pastors and teachers, we, I, better make sure that it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
