The Pastor Confessing Sin in Prayer
How Ministers Are to Lead Towards Supplication in the Pulpit
Howdy!
As important as the Bible is to the public worship of Christ’s Church one of the more unique elements in a protestant service is the pastoral prayer. Sometimes I get poked at for the length of my pastoral prayers at Bethany. It’s interesting that in older times when there was less going on in the morning gathering the people of God actually worshiped for much longer than we do now.
Whether we are speaking about the sermon, the singing, or the reading of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, but especially the lifting up of petitions unto the Lord the congregation was expectant of much more content than we generally do today. Part of it is cultural, some of it is weakness spiritually, a lot of it is just changes in the world. Focusing too much on time can cause us to miss the purpose of what we are doing specifically in the pastoral prayer portion. For our walk through the Westminster Directory today, and for the next few weeks, we are going to be discussing the place and purpose of the various prayers we make in our own worship service, both morning and evening, and how we can use the directory’s instructions to improve our own attention span for spending these moments in the presence of our Lord and Master.
Here is the section for today:
AFTER reading of the word, (and singing of the psalm,) the minister who is to preach, is to endeavour to get his own and his hearers hearts to be rightly affected with their sins, that they, may all mourn in sense thereof before the Lord, and hunger and thirst after the grace of God in Jesus Christ, by proceeding to a more full confession of sin, with shame and holy confusion of face, and to call upon the Lord to this effect...
Whenever I’ve written on prayer in the past I’ve often re-introduced the acronym A.C.T.S. The reason behind that is one, I find it helpful as a template to follow, and two it is an easy thing to teach children as we are instructing them in the right way Christians are to bring needs and our praises to God. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. Next week when we get into the meat of the DPW you’ll see that we’re not reinventing the wheel with this memory device. It is interesting to me in the quotation above that ACTS is a response to the reading of the word and the singing of a psalm. The means of grace are given by Christ as a united whole working as one in the interest of engaging multiple senses, speech, hearing, listening, all in order to bring the heart of the believer into contact with the divine. We miss the heights we reach if we don’t look.
This here is why we often get so little out of worship. It’s because we are passively involved in what is happening around us and in us as the Spirit witnesses to our soul through the word. As you look at the first sentence you’ll notice that the person called to lead the congregation in prayer at this point is the minister who is to preach. Hence why it is called the pastoral prayer. The prayer is in service of preparing the people to hear from God. Let me repeat that. The pastoral prayer is in service of preparing the people to hear from God. We see examples of this in Romans 1:8-12, 2 Cor. 1:3-4, Eph. 1:15-19, Phil. 1:3-5, Acts 16:25, and elsewhere. While these specific passages aren’t happening in the public gathering of the church they give heart to what the pastor is doing in the praying. He’s speaking for everyone, both in that he is lifting up the common needs and concerns, and he is doing so as the representative of the group in that place at that time. It is in this we see something of the priestly work of the minister. That doesn’t make him a Levite or the like, but it does show how some of the elements of what took place in old covenant worship continue into the new.
The other part of that opening sentence worth our time to review is that the pastoral prayer is to be followed by the sermon. Now, at Bethany the choir gives a brief anthem in between my saying of the pastoral prayer and when I stand up to read the word and begin to exhort the Bible for the next thirtyish minutes. While that doesn’t violate the spirit of the DPW’s interest we do that primarily to give us time to reset and honestly for me to take a deep breath and make ready my own heart to preach. Outside of the practical matters there is also a desire to show once more that nothing that happens in the worship of Christ’s Church can or should be done for any other reason than to bring glory to God and obey His commandments. Deuteronomy 12:32 and myriads of other passages from Scripture inform us on how we are to go about not just honoring the wishes of our Heavenly Father, but ensuring He blesses us in His worship. Yet again what we see going on here is the way each part of the service is meant to serve the one that came before. There should be a flow and growth building up to the crescendo of protestant praise, which is the moment the sheep are fed, in accordance with what Jesus told Peter in John 21:15-19.
The last thing I want to focus on in today’s walk through is the content of the prayer. As I noted above we’ll do more of this, but in the quotation I pasted there is a concern to have the pastor, as much as those present, to get his own heart ready for the preaching of the word. As someone who is being spoken to here it’s worth noting that in order for me to preach well (not in the sense of doing a good job) I must be willing to confess my own sin and weakness and need to rely on the grace of God for my own personal life with my own savior. Far too many ministers fall for the simple reason that they forget they themselves fall short of the glory of God and are in as much need, if not more, of the righteousness of Jesus Christ as anyone else. If a pastor cannot preach to himself as he praying than he is in need of a quick reminder of the testimony of David in Psalm 32:5-7, and with which we will close:
I acknowledged my sin to You, and my iniquity I have not hidden. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” And You forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah For this cause everyone who is godly shall pray to You In a time when You may be found; surely in a flood of great waters they shall not come near him. You are my hiding place; you shall preserve me from trouble; you shall surround me with songs of deliverance.
Another word:
https://www.challies.com/articles/a-pastoral-prayer-10/
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church