If you’re not familiar with Ligonier Ministries, their site is definitely worth checking out. Some of the greatest theological minds, today, post articles on their blog every single week. It is a ripe field for gleaning a lot of knowledge, anytime.
Just today, Joel Beeke posted an article titled “5 Methods for Fighting Half-Hearted Prayer.” Not prone to piggy-back very often, I still had the thought of how many of us need to read this both for our personal walks, as well as for how we pray for and take the gospel to the nations.
Over the next five weeks, we will cover one of these topics about praying for the nations each week, in depth:
1. Give priority to prayer and praying for the nations. Beeke begins his article with this statement. To so many, it would seem that this would cause a “Well, duh!” reaction, yet, in the busy world that we live in, very few of us give prayer the priority it deserves. Too busy, too tired, too “burned-out” – we don’t have to try very hard to come up with an excuse for not doing what we should be doing with great joy!
But, we can’t stop there, either…we must give priority to prayer and praying for the nations. If our prayers rarely move outside of our individual and small circles, we are missing out on asking the Lord to move through us to advance his kingdom among the nations. In other words, we are missing out on so much identifiable fruit from our gospel-centered labor – seeing the nations come to know the living God. If we are not engaging the nations through prayer, there is very little chance that we’re honestly going to engage the nations in any other way, either. One could even argue that it is impossible to do so.
This week, slow down a little bit and take hold of the idea of giving priority to prayer – prayer for yourself, for your family, for your community, for the nations! Stop praying only for the things that make you most comfortable and lift up the work that our glorious God is doing around the globe in continuing to bring his own people to salvation, and how you might play a part in it!