Prayer & Proclamation

Welcome to the In Touch podcast with Charles Stanley for Wednesday, October Fourteenth. Preparing and delivering a sermon or Bible lesson with impact begins with something fundamental. Stay with us to discover the vital connection between prayer and proclamation. We began by talking about the place of prayer in the life and ministry of the servant of God, and we talked about the place of prayer in our personal life, in our pastoral leadership. And this morning, I want to talk about the place of prayer in our proclamation of the word of God.

And I want you to turn, if you will, to Colossians chapter four, and let's read the second, third, and fourth verses of that chapter. Verse two begins. Paul said, "Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving. Praying at the same time for us as well, that God may open up to us a door for the words, so that we may speak forth the mystery of Christ, for which I have also been imprisoned, in order that I may make it clear in the way I ought to speak." Now, Paul is simply saying in this passage, he says, "Here is my prayer request." He said, "First of all, devote yourselves to prayer. That isn't just hop down, pray a little bit, and hop up and on your way, but make it a lifestyle." And he says, "Here are my two requests.

First of all, you would pray that the doors of opportunity might be open, and secondly." You would pray that I may know how to present the truth in such a way they will hear it, understand it, and be impacted by it.

So that's exactly what I want to talk about this morning, and that is this matter of the place of prayer and the proclamation of the word of God. And I want to begin where I believe most of you are concerned, and that is praying about the opportunities to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul was requesting that they pray for doers of Opportunity to be opened, and I want to challenge you this morning. You need to begin praying now, Lord. You open your door of opportunity, not some place that somebody else thinks ought to be, but God, where you have prepared me.

Now I want to give you a little warning. The place God opens for you to preach and proclaim the word of God will be partially determined. By the degree to which you prepare yourself to preach it, you cannot afford to be lazy, slothful, and get by. You're dealing with the souls of men. You're dealing with the will of God.

You're dealing with the purpose of God, the plan of God, what He had in mind for you before you were ever born. You cannot afford to be sloppy, negligent, and with the attitude of just getting by. If you're going to pray for God to open a door of opportunity for you, you need to remember something. You cannot afford to ask God to give you a great door of opportunity unless you have given yourself away to Him as best you know how in preparing to preach the gospel. And I want to give you several illustrations of that.

That Personal things that happened to me in my own life, because I think they're so apropos to what we are talking about. And Paul was saying to these Galatians, he says, "You pray for doors of opportunity to be open," and so we should pray for that, and we should ask other people to pray for us. But I want to assure you of something this morning: that first of all, if God has called you, He already has your place picked out. If you will obey Him and you will trust Him, don't worry about whether you're going to have a place to preach or not. In fact, I've never been anywhere I was particularly wanted, to be honest, except the first church.

And let me give you an example. When I went to Miami, do you know the only reason the pulpit committee asked me to preach? Had a friend of mine who had been saved under the ministry up in Fruitland. He had some cabins up there, and he got his life straightened out. He harassed literally the pulpit committee of the First Baptist Church of Miami so badly.

They finally said, "Okay, George, just have him come down here and preach, and let's get this over with." So I was on my way to Haiti on a mission trip, and I came back through. And so my uncle Jack was in the congregation that morning. He was lost, and God knows I preached to him for forty minutes trying to get him saved. And so they called me, and I went to Miami. But they told me afterwards.

They said the only reason we called you is to get him off our back. He worried us to death.

So then I went to Bartow, Florida. Let me tell you again, I wasn't wanted. I'm trying to encourage you. You get the message. This pulpit committee came to Bartow, Florida, to hear me preach, and so I gave the invitation.

Walked down, people start coming, following. I got on my knees and pray with this fella to be saved. There was seven members of the pulpit committee.

So they left. They said, "No way, will we have him? Our church wouldn't be ready for that." So they walked away that Sunday and they said, "We couldn't have him as the pastor." I'm going to tell you what God will do when He wants you where He wants you. That committee visited 52 different churches the next year, and here's what they told me. They said we were here a year ago, and God has had to work on us for a year to help us realize you're the kind of man we need, not necessarily what we thought we wanted.

Would you come be our pastor? God isn't expecting you to be as good as someone else. He's not going to put you in a particular place because you're eloquent, because you're intellectual, because of all these attributes you have. He's going to place you where He has chosen to put you to serve Him, no matter what the circumstances are. If you a word about that, lay that down.

Just give that to God. Forget that, and just tell God that you're giving your best in preparation. And you know, at the right time, He will put you in the right place.

Now, the second thing that Paul asked them to pray about was the way he preached the gospel. Listen to this. He said, "Let he said in verse four, pray also in order that I may make it clear." In the way I ought to speak, he says, "I want you to pray not only for the place, but I want you to pray for the proclamation of the word of God." So let's talk about that for just a moment. And I want to talk about first of all the priority of prayer in the preparation of the message. I believe is step number one in preparing for a message of God, whether it is a professor.

Who's going to teach you, or whether it is a pastor standing in the church? Preparation number one is to get on your knees and to ask God to speak to your heart. Anybody can grab an outline. Anybody can grab a passage of scripture and work them out a little outline. But here is the question you have to ask yourself: Do you want to make an impression, or do you want to make an impact?

And those are the two things you've got to decide. I want to list a danger here for you that I don't want you to forget. For God's sake, do not forget this. Here is a critical danger in preparing a sermon, and this is why many of them have no impact, but they may be impressive. Sermon preparation, whether it is going through a book and whether it is a topic or whatever it might be.

But no matter what that passage is, you have no business preaching it until it has immeshed itself into your own thinking, until God has sifted your life and your spirit and your actions and your attitudes and your habits through that truth, until it becomes a part of you. And then, when you speak it, those people who are listening know you are talking about something that God is doing in your life, and Is it not true that our messages ought to be the expression of what God has been doing in our life all week long? If you depend on your eloquence and your abilities and your talents and your gifts, here's what's going to happen: you're going to impress some folks, and you may get along for a while. You say, "Well, didn't you already say that?" Right, because that is the greatest danger you have. Depending on your education, depending on your eloquence, depending on your abilities, depending on your talents, rather than depending upon God, and I plead with you in Jesus' name to prepare your sermons at least partially on your knees, literally.

You say, "Well, look, I can be just as spiritual sitting behind the desk." I believe that, but I want to tell you something. There's something about getting on the floor on your knees before an open Bible and telling God, Lord, there is not anything in me worth sharing with anybody unless you work it in my heart. And God, I wanted to make an impact. I don't want to make an impression. I want to make an impact.

And God, if it's going to happen, it's going to have to be Your life in me, through me, and not something that I have to give myself.

Now you have a choice. You can get along, maybe in your denomination, and you can do rather well. But one of these days, you are going to have to stand before God. And friend, your denomination and what the world has said of you won't be worth anything in the presence of Jesus Christ when reality you face. And I want to plead with you.

In sermon preparation, don't do it sitting down and on your feet, but get on your knees and tell God, Lord. If you don't do it, it's not going to happen.

So we're talking about praying in the preparation. I want to talk about praying in the proclamation. You can write this down. Prayerless preaching is powerless preaching. You can just mark that down.

Prayerless preaching is going to be powerless preaching.

So let me just share something with you that I say. I make it a habit to always say this before I stand up to preach. I always say, "Lord, I choose death to performance and death to approval." And what that does, it cuts your pride right out from under you. And pride is devastating in the ministry. Devastating in the ministry.

And some of the finest men I know—when I think about it, I could weep when I think about some of the finest men I know—began to believe what folks told them. And my friend, for God's sake, don't believe what you hear about yourself. Just remember who you are. You've been made a saint. By the grace of God, privileged above all men to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

My friend, you and I have nothing to be proud about but Jesus Christ. You cannot afford to believe what people say about you. It will destroy your ministry. I believe in the proclamation of the word of God. The degree to which a man prays and is Submissive to the Lord Jesus Christ, humbles himself before God, acknowledges Him.

To that degree, does his life make an impact, and to no other. I want you to mark this down. You cannot separate in preaching the gospel. You cannot separate purity from power. Those two go hand in hand.

You cannot separate purity from power. If there is power, there's got to be purity, not perfection, purity of motivation, of life, of purpose. There have to be these two together. If there's going to be power, there's got to be purity. And I want to plead with you.

To ask God, Lord, make me so helpless that I can't do it without you. You can study all you want to, and that's absolutely essential. I get up on Monday morning and I study, and I study every day of the week. I can't wait for Sunday morning. But I'm going to tell you something.

It's nothing but paper and ink, unless the Spirit of God raises it up. And you see, people need to hear. They need to hear somebody preaching who's got something burning on the inside of them.

Now, let me just share a little something with you here. The wisest thing you can do is to get somebody to pray for you while you're preaching.

Now, I challenged our folks to fast and pray for a week. I said, "Now, what I want you to do is, I want you. I'd been preaching a series on passages that dealt with prayer, and I came to fasting and prayer as the last one. I said, 'Now, here's what I want us to fast and pray about. I want us to fast and pray first of all that God would clean up our lives so that whatever He wants to do with us, He'll be able to do it.' So I didn't know exactly how they were going to respond to that." I'm going to tell you what one week of fasting and praying will do.

After one week of fasting and praying on Sunday morning, 81 people walked the aisle.

Some getting saved, some joining the church, some for other reasons. 81 people, one Sunday morning. Nothing else went on that week, except that we fasted and prayed. It's like God said.

Now, see what'll happen. Here's the thing I'm afraid of. You're gonna depend upon something else but your knees, and I'm telling you, you're gonna make a mistake. And worse than that, listen. Worse than that, you're gonna miss.

God's exciting intervention in your life, in the most exciting and beautiful ways. There is no way to tell what God will do with you if you'll just remember, you've got to pray it through, and not try to manipulate it and work it out.

Now, I am going to tell you something: if you've got pride in your life, you won't do it. But if your spirit is one of humility, you will. Not enough to pray before I preach while I'm preparing, during the time, and before we proclaim it, but after the proclamation, the prayer is just as important. Let me tell you why. When you finish preaching and all these folks have told you how wonderfully well you did, you need to go somewhere right quick in your study, get on your knees.

And give all of that to God. You say, "Well, you know, God gets all the glory." Wait a minute. You need to tell Him. You need to tell Him, Lord. I lay all of that before You, and I still I acknowledge God.

I'm absolutely helpless. Listen, there have been times when I've walked away and gone back to my study and wept and wept and wept. Absolutely amazed at what God had done with something that I felt was so simple, so plain. There's a mystery in preaching you'll never be able to explain. But if you want to enjoy it all of your life, you pray while you're preparing and before you're preaching, and you be sure you pray after you've preached.

Now I'm going to tell you one good reason why.

Something happens to a man when he preaches all day on Sunday. He is emotionally drained. If he puts it out with all of his heart and pours it out with all that he is, he's emotionally drained. When a man gets emotionally drained, he becomes vulnerable. And when he becomes vulnerable, he becomes dangerous.

And I believe there are a lot of good men who've fallen in the ministry because they did not realize what was happening to them on the inside. When a man gets emotionally drained, he's poured out his heart. God has just drained it all out of him. He needs to get on his knees and ask the Lord to renew him. And men get in trouble because they have emotional needs that don't get met, and instead of getting on their knees and asking God to renew them, to reinvigorate them, and trusting Him to provide the way God intends for men to be provided for and women.

Men get in trouble. Good men get in trouble, and they begin to look for somebody else to meet some need in their life. I want to give you a warning. You better pray while you are preparing, before you proclaim it, and after you proclaim it. I want to give you four words in conclusion.

Four words. I want you to jot them down. I believe that if your ministry, if you're preaching and teaching the Word of God, is bathed in prayer, before, during, and after, people will be able to say about your preaching these four things. First of all, that it is faithful. You're going to be faithful to the Word of God.

Secondly, it's going to be fruitful. People's lives are going to be changed. You're going to make an impact. Thirdly, it will be fearless—not for approval, not for performance. And number four, there's going to be a fervency about it, a burning, something going on inside of you.

They cannot deny. And that is my prayer. For you, as a preacher of the gospel, that it might be said of your ministry: faithful, fruitful, fearless, fervent in the work of the Lord. Thank you for listening to Prayer and Proclamation. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by in touch dot org.

This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.