Prayer for God’s Servants

There are many weighty and solemn considerations which powerfully plead for the church of God on behalf of her ministers and pastors. The first that may be adduced is the magnitude of their work. A greater work than theirs was never entrusted to mortal hands. No angel employed in the celestial embassy bears a commission of higher authority or wings his way to discharge a duty of such extraordinary greatness and responsibility. He is a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ, an ambassador from the court of heaven, a preacher of the glorious gospel of the blessed God, a steward of the mysteries of the kingdom. Properly to fill this high office, giving to the household their portion of meat in due season; going down into the mine of God’s Word, and bringing forth to the view of every understanding its hidden treasures; to set forth the glory of Immanuel, the fitness of His work, and the fullness of His grace; to be a scribe well instructed, rightly dividing the word of truth; to be wise and skillful to win souls, the grand end of the Christian ministry—oh, who so much needs the sustaining prayers of the church as the minister of Christ?

Secondly, the painful sense of their insufficiency supplies another affecting plea. Who are ministers of Christ? Are they angels? Are they superhuman beings? Are they inspired? Nay, they are men in all respects like others. They partake of like infirmities, are the subjects of like assaults, and are estranged from nothing that is human. As the heart knoweth its own bitterness, so they only are truly aware of the existence and incessant operation of those many and clinging weaknesses of which they partake in sympathy with others. Yet, God has placed upon them a work which would crush an angel’s powers if left to his self-sustaining energy.

Thirdly, the many and peculiar trials of the ministry and the pastorate ask this favor at our hands. These are peculiar to, and inseparable from, the office that he fills. In addition to those of which he partakes alike with other Christians—personal, domestic, and relative— there are trials to which they must necessarily be utter strangers. And as they are unknown, so are they unrelievable by the people of their charge. With all the sweetness of affection, tenderness of sympathy, and delicacy of attention which you tender to your pastor, there is yet a lack which only Jesus can supply, and which, through the channel of your prayers, He will supply. In addition to his own, he bears the burdens of others. How impossible for an affectionate, sympathizing pastor to separate himself from the circumstances of his flock, be those circumstances what they may. So close and so sympathetic is the bond of union! If they suffer, he mourns; if they are afflicted, he weeps; if they are dishonored, he is reproached; if they rejoice, he is glad. He is one with his church. How feelingly the apostle expresses this: “Besides those things that are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is offended, and I burn not?” (2 Corinthians 11:28&29). To see a Christian pastor, in addition to his own personal grief borne often in uncomplaining loneliness and silence, yet bowed down under accumulated sorrows not his own, with others looking to him for sympathy, for comfort, and for counsel, is a spectacle which might well arouse the slumbering spirit of prayer on behalf of every Christian minister. We marvel not to hear the chief of the apostles thus pleading, “Brethren, pray for us” (1 Thessalonians 5:25).

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