Praying for our Pastors

Next week, we will have our Pastors and Wives Prayer Retreat at Lake Yale.  On the 2nd day of the retreat, we will have a time of intercessory prayer where pastors will pray for each other and pastor's wives will pray for each other in groups of three.  While preparing for our time together, I found this article by Charles Spurgeon that I've decided to share with our pastors.  I want to encourage our churches to also pray for our pastors as they labor in love for you and for the glory of Christ. 

Praying for the Minister by Charles Spurgeon

Every Christian should be prayed for; we each have a claim upon the other for loving intercession. The members of the body of Christ should care for one another, but especially should the minister receive the prayers of his flock. I have sometimes heard his duties called arduous, but that word is not expressive enough. The works in which he is occupied lie quite out of the region of human power. The minister is sent to be God’s messenger for the quickening of the dead. How can he do it? He can do nothing at all unless the Spirit of God is with him through the prayer of his brothers. He is sent to bring spiritual food to the multitude; that is to say, he is to take the loaves and fishes, and with them, few as they are, he is to feed thousands. An impossible commission! He cannot perform it. Apart from divine help, the enterprise of a Christian minister is only worthy of ridicule. Apart from the power of the Eternal Spirit, the things that the preacher has to do are as much beyond him as though he had to weld the sun and moon into one, light up new stars, or turn the Sahara into a garden of flowers. We have a work to do concerning which we often cry, “Who is sufficient for these things?” If we are put to this work but do not have the prayers of our people, and in consequence do not have the supply of the Spirit, we are of all men the most miserable. Who can enlighten the blind eye? Who can bring spiritual hearing into the deaf ear? Indeed, who can quicken the dead soul but the eternal, enlightening, quickening Spirit? There it lies before us, a vast valley full of bones. Our mission is to raise them from the dead. Can we do it? No, by no means, of ourselves. Yet we are to say to those dry bones, “Live.” Our mission is absurd; it is worthy of laughter, unless we have prayer and the supply of the Spirit with us. If we have those, the bones shall come to other bones, the skeleton shall be fashioned, the flesh shall clothe the bony fabric, the Holy Ghost shall blow upon the inanimate body, and life shall be there, and an army shall throng the cemetery. Let us but invoke the Spirit and go forth to minister in His might, and we shall do marvels yet, and the nation, and the world itself, shall feel the power of the gospel of Jesus. But we must have the Spirit.

Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon Commentary: Philippians, ed. Elliot Ritzema, Spurgeon Commentary Series (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014), 34–35.