Can You Hear Me Now? Why Ministers of God Must Connect with God, Part One
- James Merritt
- Dec 2, 2008
Cell Phones have the potential to infuriate us to no end. there is nothing quite like the burning anger that comes from droning on to make a crucial point in a difficult conversation only to discover that you dropped the call several minutes earlier. Nothing causes my blood pressure to shoot through the roof like a dropped call at a critical moment.
I often wonder why we can put a man on the moon, send an email around the world in a matter of seconds, store thousands of songs on something smaller than a deck of cards, yet we cannot perfect cell phones? Every one of us has felt like the man in the commcercial who asks the now-famous question: “Can you hear me now?”
Dropping Calls with the Divine
Do you ever feel that way about prayer? Do you ever wonder “Can He hear me now?” Do you ever wonder (like phone calls) if your prayers ever get dropped? Even worse do you ever feel as if you haven’t even perfected the art of making one truly successful “call” where the connection and the conversation was all you (and God) wanted it to be?
This can be a difficult place for a minister to be. after all, we are the ones who instruct everyone else on the importance of prayer. we teach people how to pray. we lead others in corporate prayer. To admit that we struggle to make the connection puts us in a bit of a predicament. Prayer just doesn’t come naturally. I know that prayer is supposed to be a dialogue, but so many times it seems like a monologue. Many times it is as much a battle as it is a blessing.
I am reminded of a pastor in a certain church who called the children down to the front of the church every Sunday to tell them a story. One time, he brought a telephone with him to illustrate the idea of prayer. He said, “Now kids, you know how you talk to people on the telephone and you don’t see them on the other end of the line, but you know that they are there?” All the children nodded their heads “yes.” He said, “Talking to God is like talking on the telephone. Even though you can’t see Him, He is on the other end of the line and He is listening.” About that time, a little boy piped up and said, “Oh yeah. What’s His number?” But isn’t that what we often ask: “What’s His number?” “What’s the combination?” “What’s the secret to modeling the very thing I want to lead my people to do?”
Truth be told, prayer is one of if not the most difficult parts of ministry. In fact, only 2 percent of pastors claim to possess the gift of intersession / prayer.[i] Prayer is hard work, and it becomes especially difficult when we have relentlessly given ourselves to our church, our children, our wives and our staff only to realize that we have only crumbs left for God.
R. Kent Hughes, pastor of the College Church of Wheaton, noticed that many of the books on preaching said little if anything about prayer. This led him to comment,“This, and what experience God so far has given me in preaching and prayer, has brought a conviction. Should I ever write a book on essentials for preaching, I know now that I would devote at least a third of it to spiritual preparation in matters such as prayer. This would be the first third.”[ii]
We must always make time for prayer because if God is as real, personal and powerful as we believe he is, then prayer is the most powerful weapon in our ministerial arsenal. Not only will it renew us, it will breathe life into our ministry.
