The Praying Pastor

Ligon Duncan

Our private prayer life ought to spill over into our public practice of prayer, rather than we have this performative prayer that we do, and then there’s an emptiness of it in our personal experience.

Matt Smethurst

All the other duties and privileges we have, there can be those mixed motives that we’re actually doing it for the applause of others, but in private prayer, who we are on our knees is who we are. Indeed.

Matt Smethurst

Welcome back to the everyday pastor a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt smitherst and I’m LIG Duncan, and we’re gonna be talking over the next several minutes about fostering a culture of prayer in our churches. This is something that every pastor wants, every pastor longs for, and yet it can be easier said than done. But before we talk about establishing a congregational culture of prayer. LIG, let’s just focus on the pastor himself. Why is prayer not just this sort of obligatory thing that you have to acknowledge because God cares about it, but is actually indispensable for being able to do ministry?

Ligon Duncan

One thing is it’s a means of grace. So for a pastor, you need all the grace you can get to live life, to serve your family, to do ministry, you need to avail yourself to God in prayer. Another thing is the great danger of pastoral ministry is that we do performance prayer. We pray for other people, and it may be deeply meaningful to them. Praying for someone in the hospital before they have a surgery, praying for a family going through a significant life event, praying at a funeral, praying at a wedding. And our words may be deeply meaningful to them, and they may be filled with Scripture. And yet, if in our own lives, we are not talking to God, that prayer can empty out and be merely something that we are doing for someone else, and Jesus warned about that in the Sermon on the Mount, he warned about people who had had the experience of being appreciated for the prayers that they were praying, and he warned them that they were empty vessels with an outward appearance of righteousness, and inside they were filled with sin. And so in the Christian life, because as pastors, we are called to pray for our people, and it’s one of the duties and joys of our ministry. We need to make sure that that is not a facade, it’s not empty of personal reality. And so I think every minister that I’ve ever met has felt a need to grow deeper in prayer. And I can, I can rattle off a list of significant people in my life who have expressed that desire to be more at home and in comfort, in prayer with God in private. So RC Sproul told a story of how for many, many years, he was really, really good at the practice of studying the scriptures in private, and yet Archie Parrish had a profound impact on him in indicating him. RC, your devotional life isn’t complete unless your study of the Scripture is paired with a robust practice of prayer. Tim Keller shared that story, and even having written a book on prayer, talked about how his experience of being diagnosed with terminal cancer had impacted his prayer life, and that he and Cathy had had the best prayer life after that diagnosis that they had ever had before. Any any wished that he had had that private practice of prayer to that degree, in that way before, even though, long ago, he had, he had known the importance of that and emphasized the importance of that, and had practiced it to a certain extent. So I think almost all of us feel like we’ve got some growing to do in our private practice of prayer. And I’ve been helped by people who have a good, disciplined plan for prayer and then a practice of prayer. I have a friend who came to stay with me when I was in doing post graduate studies in Edinburgh, and he used prayer cards. I had never used prayer cards before, and that practice really helped me organize myself and be focused in private prayer. And one of the things. You prayed before we started this morning, and one of the things you did is you pointed us to a passage of scripture. And I find that prayers that are filled with a language of Scripture are incredibly helpful and encouraging to me, and so I want my prayer to be filled up with a language of Scripture so that I’m praying God’s word back to him first, but so also that I’m edifying the people that I’m praying with and for as I pray for them, because the scriptures are always going to edify them. My thoughts may not, but the scriptures are always going to edify them. So I’ve been helped by professors, pastors and others that have prayed scripture that has been super helpful for me in private prayer, and then that spills over into your public prayer life. And that’s really how it ought to be, right? Our private prayer life ought to spill over into our public practice of prayer, rather than we have this performative prayer that we do, and then there’s an emptiness of it in our personal experience.

Matt Smethurst

Yeah, you mentioned Keller’s journey there, and as I was working on the Tim Keller on the Christian life book over the last year, plus, focusing on his teaching on prayer was one of the most personally challenging and edifying experiences of that whole project, and it’s because here’s a guy who actually did emphasize prayer from the very beginning of his ministry, and yet, one or two months before he died, he was doing an interview, and someone said, as you look back over all your decades as a pastor, what is one thing you wish you had done differently? And he said, that’s easy. I should have prayed more, right? And I think that the more life you experience, the more difficulties you face, both ministerially and personally, the more you see that, yeah, prayer is not just an accessory or an add on to the Christian life. It is our life and blood. In fact, one of the things that that Keller said was that if, if, if he wanted to cut to the chase with someone, it’s kind of like what you mentioned. It’s the hardest thing to fake your private prayer life. If he wanted to know about your vibrancy as a Christian, specifically talking to a pastor, he wouldn’t ask about your preaching ministry, he wouldn’t ask about your public prayers. He would ask about your private prayer life, because there’s a sense in which that’s the hardest thing to fake, and that’s because there’s no incentive outside of love for God and trust in His power and dependence on him. There’s no incentive in the eyes of man for doing it, whereas these other things, sharing, the Gospel, preaching, great sermons, counseling, you know, all the other duties and privileges we have, there can be those mixed motives that we’re actually doing it for the applause of others, but in private prayer, who we are on our knees is who we are, indeed, right? And so it lays us bare in a way that that really, really does challenge me. I want to ask you more about some of the particular habits you’ve you’ve established over the years. You mentioned the prayer cards before you talk about that, though, I do think I’ve noticed, as a pastor that it’s helpful to just remind people of what prayer is. I know it seems like you know, just Christianity, 101, but helping people realize that there is this two way conversation with the God of the universe that he has initiated, not us, and he has spoken to us in His Word, and then invited us to speak back to him, right? It’s very simple, right? But this idea that in prayer we are answering God, he has talked to us, and we’re talking back to him, and he’s he’s not just begrudgingly said, Well, if you get your act together, you can come in my presence. But he’s flung open the door of access to the throne room of grace through Christ and said, Come run into my presence. Lay your requests at my feet. I’m a good and generous father, and I love to give good gifts to those who ask in faith. And so I just think as pastors, as we think about discipling our people, and as we think about ourselves going to Him in prayer, we need to remember that we don’t have to, as it were, twist his arm to get access to his presence. The door is already open, right? You mentioned those prayer cards. You mentioned some other examples. When you what has your journey in prayer looked like over the years? Was your prayer life 30 years ago different than it is today? And how is you know, it

Ligon Duncan

has definitely fluctuated in terms of planning for prayer and and learning what I need to do to be consistent in prayer. And let me just confess I am certain to. You talked about Tim wishing that he had prayed more, I could say the same thing. I am certain that one of the reasons why I did not pray more as a young minister was the pressure that I felt under. And that’s what I’m admitting, is a lack of faith. You feel like you have to do certain things in order to do what your people expect you to do in ministry. And what gets squeezed out of that is God, right? Because I’m not depending on God to do the work amongst my people, and so I take time that I could be spending with God, because I’m trying to be not necessarily successful, but I am trying to survive in the job, and I’m trying to do what they expect. And

Matt Smethurst

we almost feel like we can get away with not praying in a way we can’t get away with doing other things, because if we don’t do other things, people will notice. If we don’t pray, only God will notice, which when you say it out loud, it shows well,

Ligon Duncan

even the way you helpfully defined what we’re doing in prayer, you are talking with God. From the earliest days of Christianity, you can find people like Clement of Alexandria and others giving really simple definitions of prayer. Prayer is conversing with God. Prayer is your soul doing business with God, and I try to think of it in two ways, especially one, it’s expressing to God what I need. But even more deeply, it’s expressing my desire for God. So it’s not just saying, God help me, and that’s been my most frequent prayer in life, is Lord help me. And that’s good for us to pray, and it’s good for us to pray that specifically, and it’s good for us to recognize that ultimately he’s the only one that can help us, even when he uses means, ultimately he’s behind every help that we get. But if he’s just help, then he’s a means to an end, and so if he’s the desire that we have, then he’s the end. And so as a pastor, I want to be praying to God for help, but I also want to be praying God. I want you. We want our people to get God. That’s what we want out of our ministry. We want our people to get God. So I want to get God myself while I’m trying to help them get God in ministry. And so in my prayer life, I want to express that so that that’s that is definitely something that being around brothers and sisters who are really good at prayer, and God has put brothers and sisters in my life, from i From my earliest days, that were faithful in interceding for me, and thus gave me an example of faithfulness in prayer. And I knew that you could tell that their hearts were doing business with God just because of the way they were, the way they reacted in trials, the way they checked on me. I could tell, you know, you can tell when somebody’s checking on you because they’ve been praying for you. Going back to the prayer cards that friend what, what he did, and I had never seen it done before, was he had a person or a family or a church on the top of each card, he had specific prayer requests and Scripture references down and on the back side he had when he had prayed for them, he just marked the date, you know, January the second, February the third, whenever he had prayed, so he could keep track of how often he was praying. Some of the prayers were for himself, some of the prayers for his wife, some of the prayers for his children, some of the prayers for his elders and his local congregation, but some of the prayers were for other pastors, missionaries, other churches, etc. I had never organized for prayer like that, and so that was maybe the first prompt, and I would have been 27 around 27 at the time, that was the first prompt that, hey, I need to do some organization for prayer, or I’m never, ever. We organized to do Bible study. We organized to prepare sermons. Why wouldn’t you do some preparation for prayer and expect to see some enhancement in your prayer life? So that that brother really helped me in prayer, just because I got We were together for a few days, we were staying in the same flat, and I got to see him pray in the mornings and ask him, Hey, how are how are you planning for that? How does that work? That helped me a lot. How about you what? What are some of the things that have helped you along the way? Well,

Matt Smethurst

you mentioned staying with that brother and being struck by his prayer life. I almost 20 years later, I can remember rooming so I was a missionary right out of college overseas, and there was a person on staff with the organization I was serving with who, you know, a couple decades older than me. He was over there for a visit, and we were at a conference rooming together, and I remember feeling like I was waking up early to spend time with the Lord, but every morning that week that I woke up, he was already awake at the foot of his bed, on his knees, praying to God, and it’s just a small act of faithfulness, but I saw a tenacity, I saw a desperation, I saw an authenticity to his relationship with King Jesus that had an impression on me. I’m talking about it now, all these years later. And so it’s people like that, as you said, examples like that, who have put wind in my sails when it comes to my prayer life. And who have observed that, you know, prayer kind of like I was saying earlier it prayer is, is basically the most objective measurement of our dependence on God, right? Because the things we pray about are the things we trust God to handle, yeah, and the things we don’t pray about are the things we trust we can handle on our own, right? And so if we’re going through life thinking that we’re too busy to pray, that we can handle all this on our own, eventually we are just going to be running on spiritual fumes, and we’re not going to be able to serve our people out of the overflow, as you said, of experiencing God Himself. Prayer is how we enter into the happiness of God, and then relay it to others. And so as we think about relaying it to others, as we think about not just our own prayer lives, but fostering that culture of prayer in our church, how did you seek to do that as a pastor? Well,

Ligon Duncan

again, the examples that God put in my life, both in public and in private, I’m thinking of Palmer Robertson, who taught me Old Testament biblical theology, and whose whose prayers before class were filled with scripture. I had never heard anybody pray scripture like he prayed we would get the class early, just so that we did not miss the opening prayer, because we knew it was going to be an amazing prayer. Now later, what I found was Palmer had been he had been editing for himself, just for his own edification, Matthew Henry’s method for prayer. And Palmer eventually produced his own version of that, of that book which Banner of Truth keeps in print and but you could tell that Palmer was filled with Scripture and that it came out in prayer, and it was appropriate and timely. That was a huge influence on me. And so it got me in addition to the idea of the prayer cards, knowing that my prayer is going to be best when it’s filled with scripture, right? Because if, if prayer is about expressing my desires to God, my needs to God, and expressing my desire for God, what better place to go than to Scripture to express those needs and to express that desire, and so learning to pray scripture was definitely the single most transformative thing in my life, or the Psalms, in particular, the Psalms absolutely even learning how to pray the Psalms. I mean, Matt, I would have known that the Psalms were prayers as a young man, but the learning how to turn those into your own prayer to God and hear somebody else do it, that was what flipped the switch for me, hearing Palmer Robertson pray a psalm, but pray it from himself to God for us that, oh, I can do that. I can actually do that. So one of the things that when we learn how to pray that way for ourselves and then we pray that way in public, it helps other Christians pray that way for themselves. And so I was helped by those people in my life. Then there were there were books. And so I just mentioned Matthew Henry Palmer told us. We asked him, How did you learn how to pray scripture, like you pray scripture? And he said, Matthew Henry’s method, well, he said two things. Actually said the Bible. And then he said the closet, by which he meant I, you know, the Bible teaches me how to pray, but then I have to go and I have to do it myself with God in private. And then he said, Matthew Henry’s method for prayer, I look for books that get my my juices going in the morning. Sometimes I have to read just a little bit before I can pray and and sometimes there’s just stuff going on in my life where I can’t get something out of my throat so somebody else’s prayers can actually prompt me to pray when I don’t feel like I can even get something out of my heart to God in prayer. So I like books that prompt me to prayer. Melissa Krueger has a little book five ways to pray for your children. Prompting books on prayer like that are helpful to me. Nancy Guthrie has. A little prayer about a little book about how to pray for people that are suffering, and it’s scripture prayer. But Nancy’s thought about this a lot, and she’s put together some things that are super prompting to me. And I know I’ve got a friend with cancer, how am I going to pray for him? Sometimes I’ll just open up Nancy’s book and she’ll kind of get me going. Okay, now I know how to pray there. Sometimes I just need something to get the words coming out of my heart because my my sinful tendency, Matt, I just go into myself, and I stay there, and I either worry or I brood or I fear or I’m just, I’m just frozen up, and sometimes I need a hammer to break the ice, to let you know, to let something get out and and so scripture, prayer books that prompt me in prayer, they help me.

Matt Smethurst

Yeah, one of the things that I’ve found helpful in encouraging our people to do is praying through our membership directory. So I realize it’s the year 2025, but we still print a physical copy of it so that people can keep that inside their Bibles. And we tell them it’s the second most important book you own. Yeah, and you know, it’s just a simple headshot and name of of your covenant family. These are the brothers and sisters that you are responsible for, and so just work through a few names a day, and they don’t have to be super elaborate or fancy prayers. Let it be birthed out of what you’ve read in Scripture, even just a phrase, pray that to God on their behalf, and then let them know, let them know that you prayed for them and that that you you care for them. What about in the corporate service. So we have alluded before to the importance of a pastoral prayer. We had an whole episode on why liturgy matters and in an order of service. But talk more about the utility of a pastoral prayer, because I imagine there are many pastors listening that actually might not do that. Maybe there’s a couple of prayers in the service as transitions, you know, when the music team is getting on or off the stage. Maybe, maybe there’s a prayer to open the service. But why is it something to really consider having several minutes devoted to the pastor on behalf of the church, leading them in a congregational prayer? Well, again, I

Ligon Duncan

having just warned against performative prayer, I want to be careful in what I say. It is true, though, that that you show the congregation your heart in pastoral prayer in a way that almost no place else there is a sense in which you show the congregation your heart in the sermon, but the sermon is coming from you to them. If the pastoral prayer is done right, it’s coming from you to God, and they’re just along for the ride. And hopefully you can’t fake that. Hopefully you don’t get to the point where you can fake that, and hopefully you’re prepared for that, so that you can really concentrate on talking to God with the recognition that your job is, in a certain sense, to bring them along with you to God when you when you go to him

Matt Smethurst

and pray, which is why you should pray. We not I, yes, yes,

Ligon Duncan

it’s, it’s us together. We’re all going to God together, and I’m just the public voice right now that’s hopefully expressing the whole range of desires and needs that exist in my congregation. And when you think of it that way, then you realize, wow, I’ve really got to be focused in preparing for this, because I’d be up there all day long if I expressed every desire and every need. So I’m going to have to be focused and disciplined. I think I told you before, Matt, I prayed too long in the pastoral prayer when I was early in the ministry and listening to prayer and following along in a prayer is it’s maybe the hardest part of a congregants job in public worship. And so as a pastor, you don’t want to pray too long because it’s hard. So you want to be shorter. You want to be focused, you want to be well disciplined. You want them to be able to recognize when you’re moving from different parts of prayer. And so I commend we said this when we were talking about the liturgy. It’s fine to do red prayers, but I think that there is something beneficial that is lost if the congregation never hears extemporaneous prayers that have been prepared for I don’t mean just extemporaneous prayers that are off the cuff. I mean you’ve spent some time preparing that. Okay, I want to go to I want, I want to do these five things in this prayer. I want to give a heartfelt invocation where I ask God to help us and come meet with us. I want to do adoration in this prayer, I want to do confession. I want to do assurance. I want to do intercession and supplication and thanksgiving. You want to have an outline that you’re and then you want to kind of have an idea of the scriptural words and ideas that you’re going to use so that they can follow along. And I find that when that is done, well, the people notice, yeah,

Matt Smethurst

and it’s a discipleship tool. It’s a teaching tool. We’re giving our people language and categories. I think it’s ridiculous how we can sometimes assume, well, prayer is easy, therefore we don’t need to think about it. Actually, prayer is one of the hardest things in the world, as are most of the best things in life, by the way, but in praying on behalf of our people in a Sunday service, we are leading them along and giving them an idea of what it could look like to lay our requests at the father’s feet. The way I tend to do it, is a movement from praying for needs of our church and then talking, you know, going through maybe a promise in our church covenant, or one of our priorities, praying that the Lord would grow us in this, and then praying for another local gospel, believing church in Richmond, by name, the more specific, the better you know, praying for their pastor, praying for what he’s actually preaching that morning, right, signaling that kind of gospel, catholicity, that the kingdom of God is bigger than our church, and we’re so grateful that his gospel is sounding forth from other pulpits in this city and then praying for, often, I’ll pray for, you know, people in positions of authority, as we’re commanded to do in the beginning of First Timothy two that could be everything from our local public school teachers or college administrators or the mayor or the governor or the presidential cabinet or the President himself. And I also think that the pastoral prayer is a really great opportunity to touch on more controversial matters, but as you said, in a way where we’re talking not just us to them, but from us to God. So if there has been a school shooting that week somewhere in America, if there’s a war overseas or an earthquake or a political or racial crisis, the pastoral prayer is a wonderful opportunity to disciple your people by seeing you, them, getting to see you cry out to God for this matter. And as we as we think you know, as we kind of wrap up this episode, is there anything else LIG that you would want to commend to pastors to consider whether that’s starting a weekly prayer meeting, or whether that’s doing anything else to foster this culture of prayer.

Ligon Duncan

We’ve, I mean, we’ve said that the church needs to have some place in the week where it comes together in prayer, and it’s it. There’s not one size fits all. There are different ways to do it. You and I know there are wonderful congregations that do a Sunday evening prayer meeting. There are congregations that do a Wednesday night prayer meeting or a Tuesday night prayer meeting. It’s done all over in different ways, but definitely having a prayer meeting and then, hell,

Matt Smethurst

I would let me just stop there. I would just say I could be wrong, but I’m assuming that most of the pastors listening don’t have a weekly prayer Yeah, I think that’s probably it’s something that is worth recovering. Whether it’s Sunday night, whether it’s Wednesday night, it doesn’t really matter. Find a way to do it. When you do it. I have a friend James who pastors Korean American church. And, you know, they do the kind of Korean church thing where it’s morning prayer, right? Find a way to have a family prayer meeting where you’re going to God together,

Ligon Duncan

amen. And then to help them, help them. It’s, you know, again, it’s, it’s, it’s the hardest work that a member does is together for public prayer. So you need to give lots of encouragements to your people in that area and help and instruction along the way. So that’s definitely one thing. The other thing, though, is, I think, for the pastor to keep feeding himself in prayer. So I mentioned Matthew Henry, but David Calhoun edited a little book with Banner of Truth called praying the Psalms. And it’s got some short prayers that were written by a French Protestant martyr, Augustine marlarot and were translated into English, and they’re just little collects, little five part short, almost one or two sentence prayers. But they’re really rich and they really prompt. That’d be a great devotional thing for pastors to use, but that would also prompt them for certain parts of prayer in the public service Don Carson’s book, praying with Paul helped me know, okay, this is how I can go take a Pauline prayer and then make it mine. Pray it to God for myself, but also pray it to God for my congregation. That would be a book that you could put in the hands of every congregation member and say, here’s a way to learn how to pray the Bible. Bible, right? And you’re going to learn some wonderful theology along the way, but the main thing is you’re going to learn how to pray, and you’re going to see how the Scriptures themselves inform our prayer. So books like that, and they’re thankfully a lot of them, I think pastors ought to be reading about prayer all the time, because we can always grow in our practice of prayer. You’ll you’ll find times, if you’ve done this for a few years, you’ll get hit with something you don’t know what to say or pray, but scriptures will come to mind that you have prayed before because you’ve been practicing, because you’ve been studying, because you’ve been praying, things will come to mind readily. You know, you’re always walking to the door of a congregation member in the hospital wondering, what should I pray for this person? And it will be a combination of what’s going on in their life. Where are they with the Lord? How serious is is it? You know that what’s put them in the hospital, but it’ll also be knowing the things to pray for from scripture, and that combination of things will give you direction as to how you ought to pray for that person, and but the more you’ve done it in private, the more readily that that will come when you need to pray for other people. So it this is one of the areas of the ministerial life that is the most richly rewarding, and it’s usually the last thing on our priority list. And again, with me, it’s because, you know, I don’t trust the Lord as much as I ought to trust the Lord. I’m thinking, I’ve got to do all this other stuff. I don’t have time to do this. And I think that’s an occupational temptation. And so I promise every pastor listening, you will never regret the investment that you put into this for yourself.

Matt Smethurst

And we should also sound the note that it’s not just we’re teaching people to pray and starting a prayer meeting just for the sake of prayer. It’s also an opportunity for us to see how God answers prayer Absolutely because if we’ve been praying for something together as a church family, then we also get the joy of seeing that God actually made good on his promise, of course, always to answer our request in accordance with His good, pleasing and perfect will. But Jesus looks us in the eye and says, Ask, and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be open, as the Apostle James says, we have not because we ask not so let’s model for our people, asking big things of a big God and trusting him to show up in power, because he loves to show off his grace and to give us good gifts. Matt,

Ligon Duncan

I know when, when you were, when you were studying to write the book on Tim Keller in the Christian life. You were struck by the pattern of emphasis on prayer in his ministry. But you you shared with me a quote that he said to his congregation early on. I mean, really early in the ministry at Redeemer. Could Could you share that with

Matt Smethurst

yep, I have it written right here. So what strikes me about this. This is the fall of 1989 Redeemer has just been planted. No one knows that it exists around the country. And he said this to that young congregation. And the reason I’m sharing this on the everyday pastor is because this is especially a wonderful reminder for me, yes, and for those of us in kind of professional ministry, He says, You must not mistake the exercise of gifts for grace. I can be very, very honest about this. It’s easy for me to be extremely busy, because I’m a professional Christian. I’m talking to people all the time. I’m teaching all the time. But if I’m neglecting my growth and grace, if I’m neglecting to look at my heart and see whether I’m really developing more love for people and for God, if I’m neglecting my prayer life, so I’m not really experiencing His presence, if I’m neglecting my inner life, then all my busyness can draw out of me. A certain sense of warmth I have the gift of teaching. So when I begin to teach, I feel a certain warmth that comes out. What is that? A certain spiritual warmth and passion, because it’s my spiritual gift, but I can be dying on the inside, and my in the exercise of my gift is masking that. That’s the reason why it’s possible for very, very gifted ministers to be doing great deeds and winning people and transforming their lives, and then suddenly collapse or do some scandalous sin, or just say, I’ve had it and pick up and leave their wife or something like that. Everybody says, How could that be? Was he a hypocrite? No, sometime, a long time ago, probably he began to neglect the actual growth in grace. He began to mistake the exercise of gifts for the exercise of grace, because he was getting so many pats on the back and he was so busy. And he said, Hey, I must be growing. I’m growing because my church is growing. I’m growing because more people are telling me how great I am. More people are buying my tapes. 1989 that’s why I must be growing. But all the while he was shrinking inside. It is so easy to be impoverished in our inner life. Yeah, even if on the outside, we’re checking all the boxes. So I think it’s fitting like for you to end this episode just by praying for pastors as we seek to foster this culture of prayer.

Ligon Duncan

So good. Let’s pray, Lord God. We need you more than anything. You are more important than food, and we pray that we would not trade a desire for you emanating from the depths of our heart and our life and our experience for outward appearances of busyness, effectiveness, success, gifts, whatever we pray that at the heart of our life there would be a passion for you, a desire to know you and to glorify you and to be with you and to be like you and to depend on you, rather than just ourselves. And Lord, you know how I have depended on myself too much, and I know that many of my brothers who are gifted in ministry are tempted to depend on themselves. We need to lean on you. We need to rest and know that around and underneath are the everlasting arms, and we need to know that there is nothing better than you in this world, and so we pray that we would have lives characterized by conversation with you, hearing your word, returning it back to you in prayer, communing with you in The promises of your word and in the praise of your word, and that this would characterize our lives and and help by your grace, hold us up under heavy burdens, the burdens of our congregation, and we ask, Oh God, that you would encourage the pastors that are Listening even this day to take the if necessary, the first steps to doing business with you in private, day after day after day for your praise, for their good, we ask it in Jesus name, amen. Amen.

Matt Smethurst

Thank you for listening to this episode of the everyday pastor, and particularly given this topic, if there is a pastor friend you can think of who might be discouraged or struggling in ministry, please share this episode with him. We want to help him find fresh joy in the work of ministry. Thanks for listening.