Emotion is something that people get confused about when it comes to their prayer life or their life in general. Here is a what may be a surprising thought for you when it comes to emotion and prayer.
How do you deal with emotion in your prayer life? Have you found safety in that place and time with God?
I am going to share something about building a culture of prayer that might make some of you unhappy. But I believe that it is a problem that keeps some churches from experiencing the power that prayer can provide. There is an expression out there in the church world that is kind of dangerous. The expression that I am talking about is “the gift of intersession.” This expression in part came about from the talk, in maybe the mid 1990s, about spiritual gifts. In taking assessments and writing books people would put, “the gift of intersession” alongside things like “the word of wisdom” and “prophecy”. Over time this has led to a separate class of people who are the “prayers”. This caused 3 unfortunate things:
1. It has brought an intimidation to the average Christian about prayer.
Since most will not feel like they have “the gift of intersession” they will feel inferior in prayer to those special people. They mistakenly think that because they are not the super prayers why even bother to pray. This takes away the many joys of prayer to so many Christians.
2. It has driven many in the life of prayer to weirdness.
In some churches and ministries this situation has created a separate group and culture of people that are in the prayer world. Because of this they deal mainly with each other and create their own vocabulary to describe common experiences. This new vocabulary and ways of dealing with things take on stranger and stranger forms since they never have to explain themselves to those who are not a part of the group. This then leads to a wider gulf between them and the rest of the church. It not only hurts the church because they stay away from prayer it makes the people who are praying feel distant because no one joins them in prayer.
3. It takes away the power from the rest of the gifts.
Probably the greatest danger of this “gift of intersession” is that it takes away the life of prayer from the gifts that also depend on prayer. Those with the gift of leadership will encourage others to pray, but miss the empowerment that their gift would gain through prayer. People with the gift of administration might never think that prayer is part of how they are to operate. Each of the gifts that God gives us to serve the church is empowered by our prayer life and cannot be put aside for only certain special people who pray.
There are a few things to help with this problem. One, be careful not to exclude the whole church when you talk about people on prayer teams. Two, try to find new ways to get more people involved in various aspects of prayer. Three, highlight the importance of prayer with every gift of the Spirit.
It might be not be what you think, but slip ups in this area can mess up your effectiveness very quickly. It falls in the area of not being trusted. As people of prayer we are often entrusted with information that is confidential in nature. In my work of ministering to pastors it happens all the time. This is for a couple of reasons:
1. People will trust you with things if they know you will pray for it.
People who know that you are a person of prayer will give you information about their needs. They are looking for someone they know will not just say they will pray about it, but who will actually pray about the need. But if word gets out that you can’t be trusted with that information, because you are going to blab it to everyone, you may miss some prayer assignments that God wanted you to pray.
2. God will trust you with things He knows you will talk to Him about.
God will bring into His confidence people who He is confident that He can share His heart. He told Abraham, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?” (Gen 18:17) A prayer that I pray often is, “God reveal your secrets to me.” But God is looking to see if I can handle the information that He shares in an appropriate manner. We need to practice in being trusted.
A pastor that had a great prayer team around him had one main qualification to be on the team. Anyone on his personal prayer team must not, “be given to sins of the tongue.” Is this an area that you need to strengthen to go to the next exciting level that God would have for you in your ministry of prayer?
