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Prayer of the Church
Do you have a healthy diet? How about a healthy prayer diet? Today Pastor Kyle Madson walks us through the Prayer of the Church and the importance of having a balanced prayer life.
1 Timothy 2:1
Why does the Sunday service, the gathering of God’s people, act like it acts?
Let’s specifically asked about kind of the longest prayer maybe in the whole service. Sometimes it’s called the Prayer of the Church. Probably many of you are familiar, like I am from my childhood, of this thing called a food pyramid.
It laid out a healthy balanced diet for us, talked about meats, and dairy products, and grains, and also fruits, and vegetables. It didn’t tell you that you had to eat all four of those things, or specific things in them each meal, but it gave you a scaffolding so that you knew if your diet was becoming imbalanced.
Well Saint Paul encourages the church to pray and he actually encourages it to pray in a very balanced way also. As he writes to his understudy, Timothy, he says this
Therefore I exhort (urge) first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. (1 Timothy 2:1)
Paul means for the prayer life of the church to be regular, but also for it to be balanced. So that we pray not only for the things that might immediately be on our mind and for our benefit, but so that we pray for all people, for those who are in authority and civil positions around us, for our enemies we might not otherwise want or feel like praying for. We pray for the young who have been baptized into the faith that they might grow up in that one true faith. That we pray for those who are elderly and infirm and dying that in their dying moments they might die in that same faith.
What a gracious thing, that we have a balanced prayer life, that we are taught and encouraged as the church to pray for all people. Finally it recognizes this last gracious thing that God who has given us to pray wants all men to be saved to come to a knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
