“The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching.” (1 Timothy 5:17). “Preaching and teaching are closely related. Preaching is proclaiming the Word of God and confronting listeners with the truth of Scripture. Teaching is explaining the truth in Scripture helping learners understand difficult passages, and helping them apply God’s Word to daily life. Paul says that these elders are worthy of double honor. Unfortunately, however, we often take them for granted by not providing adequately for their needs or by subjecting them to heavy criticism. Think of how you can honor your preachers and teachers.” Life Application Bible; New International Version.
Our men’s group has been doing a Bible study or small group reflection on the 7 Promises of a Promise Keeper. The aforementioned scripture supports Promise 5; to support the mission of his church by honoring and praying for his pastor and by actively giving his time and resources. As we reflected upon our shortcomings in this area, one of the things that we had been doing consistently was intentionally praying for our pastor and letting him know we were praying for him.
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Our group is structured in such a way that every guy in the group was assigned individual prayer time for our Pastor for an assigned week. The assigned guy’s responsibility was to call the Pastor at a mutually agreed upon time during the week and pray for him. The following week we received a report and the next guy was assigned. Somehow in our busyness, we all became major slackers and neglected that responsibility for which the Pastor was most appreciative. We continue to pray for him corporately during our prayer time at the end of every meeting but, we miss and he misses that individual extra effort we were providing. Having acknowledged our tardiness and slacking, we will get back to something that was a benefit to him as well as us and we believe pleased the heart of the Father.
Thursday, May 3rd is National Day of Prayer. There will be numerous opportunities during the day to acknowledge publicly or privately how the Lord has been working in your life. Take the time now to plan and set aside some time for Thursday to pray for our Nation. For more information, visit www.ndptf.org.
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