Proclaimer Blog
PRAYER and the ministry of the word
Last Monday I wrote a blog about godliness. We are headlining this at the start of the Cornhill year. I said then that we are headlining one other emphasis. So here it is: prayer, intercessory prayer for the people to whom we teach and preach the Bible. We had a profitable morning on this (at least, I thought it was profitable). We want our students to keep saying to themselves as they work at bible exposition, ‘godliness and prayer,’ that these two are vital, essential, indispensable, to the work of a bible expositor.
Part of what we studied was what we might call ‘the double ministry’ of the prophet, of the Lord Jesus, and of the apostles. That is to say, all of these both speak to people for God and speak to God for people; they preach and they pray. This double pattern appears with remarkable consistency throughout the Old Testament; the apostles reaffirm it in Acts 6:4 when they slip in ‘prayer’ alongside ‘the ministry of the word’ (Acts 6:2) as the priorities of apostolic ministry. The intercessory prayer of the prophets and of the apostles was not an optional extra to their ministries; it was an integral and essential part of their work. If the prophet merely speaks God’s words, but doesn’t intercede for his hearers, he will not truly be exercising his ministry.
Spurgeon spoke of a minister who limped along ‘for his praying was shorter than his preaching’. Let us not be like that.