Scripture References: Luke 18:1-8
When God’s people forget to pray or get too busy to pray, we sin against God, the church, and a lost world. Oh, may God, our Father, forgive us for the sin of prayerlessness!
When we fail to pray, we lose our passion for souls as well as our power. The awfulness of sin and Hell fades out. But when a child of God lives on their knees, Hell becomes a reality to fear for all men and the condition of lost souls becomes real, the passion for souls burns in our heart, and the fire of God burns on the altar. The wheels and power of Zion move when people pray.
May God forgive us for our sin of prayerlessness while a world is going headlong on a path to Hell, while the foundations are crumbling from under us and while we are standing on the very verge of losing everything dear to our hearts and for which our forefathers have bled and died.
If there was ever a time when we ought to be on our faces before God, crying to Him like Israel did in Egypt until a mighty cry would go up to Heaven and God would say, “I . . . have heard their cry . . . I have come down to deliver them” (Exodus 3:7-10). If there was ever a time when God’s people ought to besiege the throne of grace day and night, it is now in the times we are living.
Pray for the Unsaved
We truly should pray for unsaved people much more than we do, all of us. Believe it or not, I have heard Christians, even preachers, say that they didn’t believe in praying for the unsaved. I grant you that when a person is saved, he himself must make that final decision, God can draw Him, but God will not force man. If he hardens his heart and stiffens his neck, all the praying in the world can’t save him. The heartbreak of a mother can’t save a boy from Hell if he stiffens his neck and hardens his heart and determines (by his own choosing) to go to Hell. However, praying can and does bring the power of God to convict a soul, it can bring the Holy Spirit upon a lost soul in ways we can’t imagine, prayer can move the feet of a lost man toward the house of God and work wonders toward his salvation.
Did you know that Christians are the only intercessors (that I can find in the Word) that God has appointed to stand between a lost world and Hell and the only ones He has chosen to plead for their souls? You and I, saved and washed in the blood of Christ, have the Holy Spirit within us here on earth, making “intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:26). We have the risen, glorified, ascended Redeemer at the right hand of God making intercession for us. But the sinner, lost and directionless, only has us to intercede for them.
To Be Continued
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 