Of all the “one another” passages in the New Testament constraining the manner of our engagement within the body of Christ, none has registered more relentlessly of late on my mind and heart than the one found in James 5:16.

Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed (emphasis mine).

The pray for one another segment of that passage has dominated my thinking and pastoral practice ever since reading this in The Deliberate Church by Mark Dever and Paul Alexander (Crossway, 2005, 221 pages):

One of the most practical things you can do for you own personal prayer life, and for the prayer lives of other church members, is to assemble a church membership directory . . . so that everyone in the church can be praying through it a page a day. . . . We usually encourage people to pray through the page number that corresponds to the current day of the month.

Capitol Hill Baptist Church, where these brothers minister, has a lot more folks attending than OGC does. I have discovered that we can pray through our entire flock every week without much difficulty. Teddie, our church office manager and executive assistant, prepared a special version of the directory for me that has the days of the week in the margin. Each day has about fourteen family units contained within. This breaks down the whole church into manageable portions. It makes it easy for me to pray for all our people at least once a week. No other tool of late more dramatically influences my praying.

On Sunday in our concert of prayer during the 9:30 hour I introduced this concept related to another important section of Scripture, namely Eph. 6:18. Paul concludes his treatment related to putting on the full armor of God with this exhortation:

Praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.

I take that to mean that to some extent we cannot fully dress ourselves in spiritual armor without the aid of intercession by our fellow saints. This is a sobering conclusion! Who wants to go into battle without adequate protection?

So I reiterate my exhortation of Sunday morning to all of you who attended the concert of prayer and received a copy of the latest directory divided into days of the week. PRAY FOR ONE ANOTHER. Join me, the staff, and the leadership team as we press in with concerted, regular, faithful intercessory prayer that we might be strong in the Lord and the strength of His might (Eph. 6:10).

If you missed our prayer time last Sunday but would like a copy of the directory for prayer purposes, contact the office and we will be glad to see that you get a copy.

Here is a helpful post for discerning the difference between the genuine conviction of the Holy Spirit and the accusations of the devil.

I continue to read through for the second time Ed Welch’s book, Addictions: A Banquet in the Grave. It is subtitled, Finding Hope in the Power of the Gospel.

I got this from Tim Challies today.

It’s a Puritan prayer from the Valley of Vision.

O God of grace,
I bewail my cold, listless, heartless prayers;
their poverty adds sin to my sin.
If my hope were in them I should be undone,
But the worth of Jesus perfumes my feeble breathings, and wins their acceptance.
Deepen my contrition of heart,
Confirm my faith in the blood that washes from all sin.
May I walk lovingly with my great Redeemer.
Flood my soul with true repentance that my heart may be broken for sin and unto sin.
Let me be as slow to forgive myself as thou art ready to forgive me.
Gazing on the glories of thy grace may I be cast into the lowest depths of shame.
And walk with downcast head now thou art pacified towards me.
O my great High Priest,
pour down upon me streams of needful grace,
bless me in all my undertakings,
in every thought of my mind,
every word of my lips,
every step of my feet,
every deed of my hands.
Thou didst live to bless,
die to bless,
rise to bless,
ascend to bless,
take thy throne to bless,
and now thou dost reign to bless.
O give sincerity to my desires,
earnestness to my supplications,
fervour to my love.

One last thought from Dr. Carson.

So far:

Much praying is not done because we don’t plan to pray.
Adopt practical ways to impede mental drift.
At various periods in your life, develop, if possible, a prayer-partner relationship.
Choose models, but choose them well.
Develop a system for your prayer lists.
Mingle praise, confession, and intercession; but when you intercede, try to tie as many requests as possible to Scripture.
If you are in any form of spiritual leadership, work at your public prayers.

Number 8:

Pray until you pray.

This is Puritan advice. Carson writes:

What they meant is that Christians should pray long enough and honestly enough, at a single session, to get past the feeling of formalism and unreality that attends not a little praying. we are especially prone to such feelings when we pray only for a few minutes, rushing to be done with a mere duty. To enter the spirit of prayer, we must stick to it for a while. If we “pray until we pray,” eventually we come to delight in God’s presence, to rest in his love, to cherish his will. Even in dark or agonized praying, we somehow know we are doing business with God. In short, we discover a little of what Jude means when he exhorts his readers to “pray in the Holy Spirit” (Jude 20)–which presumably means it is treacherously possible to pray not in the Spirit.

He ends with this:

In the Western world we urgently need this advice, for many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers. Pray until you pray.

Lord, let us linger.

Class on Saturday, PC?

You bet. This school on this subject never closes.

So far we have these principles:

Much praying is not done because we don’t plan to pray.
Adopt practical ways to impede mental drift.
At various periods in your life, develop, if possible, a prayer-partner relationship.
Choose models, but choose them well.
Develop a system for your prayer lists.
Mingle praise, confession, and intercession; but when you intercede, try to tie as many requests as possible to Scripture.

Now for number seven:

If you are in any form of spiritual leadership, work at your public prayers.

D. A. Carson exhorts:

Many facets of Christian discipleship, not least prayer, are rather more effectively passed on by modeling than by formal teaching. Good praying is more easily caught than taught. If it is right to say that we should choose models from whom we can learn, then the obverse truth is that we ourselves become responsible to become models for others. So whether you are leading a service or family prayers, whether you are praying in a small-group Bible study or at a convention, work at your public prayers.

Enough said. Time to work on my pastoral prayer for tomorrow.

My next wedding. No question about it.