Today’s sermon, Model Prayer (3) on Matthew 6:11 is now online. This sermon sought to flesh out what a dependent, trusting heart looks like towards a God who can “give us this day our daily bread.” Hopefully the sermon was helpful in making your heart more dependent on the God who gave you life.
No service this evening. Hope you have a blessed week full of trusting the Lord for the basics.
This video from Francis Chan gets at the truth we will be looking at this coming Lord’s Day. What does it mean to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”? Here’s the question from Chan:I hope this challenges you and you come ready to hear what God’s Word has to teach us. To review, why not read through Matthew 6:9-13 (these are also the church’s memory verses for January).
I’m testing a new Android app. Thanks for bearing with the technical difficulties.
Now that I’m back from the 2011 Desiring God Conference for Pastors, here are some reflections on each of the messages.
Session 1 – Cultivating Private Prayer as a Pastor – Joel Beeke
This was a great kick off session, full of quotes and much practicality. I really felt conviction of my lack of prayerlessness through this sermon. His two paths of application were Take Hold of Self and Take Hold of God. Matt Perman tweeted that this was the best sermon on prayer he’s ever heard. I am in relative agreement, although this wasn’t an exposition as much as a topical unfolding of the subject of prayer.
Session 2 – Helping Your People Discover the Praying Life – Paul Miller
If you’ve read Miller’s book, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World
Session 3 – Prayer as a Way of Walking in Love: A Personal Journey – Francis Chan
This talk was a testimony of sorts as to how Chan has experienced answered prayer in his walk with the Lord. Great question in this talk was “Do you still believe God answers prayer?” Very motivational to the practice of prayer.
Session 4 – He Kissed the Rose and Felt the Thorn: Living and Dying in the Morning of Life Robert Murray McCheyne – John Piper
I love these biographical messages by Piper each year. This year’s didn’t disappoint. He weaved what made this young man burn with passion for God by showing his conversion and preparation for a young life. It ended up looking at the place of prayer in McCheyne’s life. Again, very encouraging.
Session 5 – Leading Family Worship – Joel Beeke
This talk had 4 goals: to lay out a paradigm for family worship, to discuss the practice of it, to lead us to preach on this and to consider more effective ways of training others in this. This talk was replete with practical ways one could go about practicing family worship.
Session 6 – Unreached Peoples and the Power of Prayer – Jerry Rankin
Another highlight of the DG conference is the missions talk or how does the subject of the conference relate to the fulfilling of the Great Commission. Rankin gave a call for us to go about obeying the Great Commission and realize that as we pray for the nations God might be changing our hearts to go ourselves.
Session 7 – Q & A – Speakers Panel
The conference typically wraps up with a session dealing with some questions the conference inspired. Helpful way to review and hear about the subject matter again.
Overall Reflection: I loved attending this conference. DG always does a great job of leading us in singing, giving us opportunities to pray and helping us think through subject matters. I personally would have liked to see more Biblical expositions, but found the messages helpful. I think, also, that sometimes commendations were confused with commands. It’s easy for pastors (especially) to treat applications as matters of obeying or disobeying what God has actually said. There was some blurring of that. However, these are minor assessments. Overall, I know that I need to be about the work of prayer in ministry and this conference helped give me avenues to flesh this out more in my life.
…the 2011 Desiring God Pastor’s Conference:
Traveled here yesterday with men from the church. With the big storm coming, we drove straight through and ended up getting in around 12:45AM today. Got into the hotel and slept pretty well. Today, we will have the conference later today, but at Noon, we are meeting with one of our church’s supported missionaries.
If you think of us, pray that God would encourage us as we think about being people of prayer and leading Crestview in this regard.
Recapping yesterday, we had a great AM Celebrating the Gospel, observing baptism and the Lord’s Supper. I don’t know about you, but hearing testimony of God’s Work to save some was very encouraging. And then, capping that off by coming together to the Lord’s table was a great blessing.
Then, in the evening, we had a great time of Corporate Prayer, specifically using Psalm 30 in our prayers for mission trips/teams, college students, and pregnancies.
I hope as we move into this week that you are encouraged because of the amazing message of the Gospel.
Speaking of criticism, CJ Mahaney introduced a helpful series yesterday on The Pastor and Personal Criticism. He writes of
…many reasons why we can expect criticism:
* A pastor can expect criticism because of his own sin, which will inevitably be present in his heart and service, no matter how mature or well meaning he is (James 3:2).
* A pastor can expect criticism because there are limitations to his gifting, meaning there will always be weaknesses in his leadership.
* A pastor can expect criticism because we often preach below-average sermons. (After one sermon, a guy asked me, “So where do you work during the week?” My sermon apparently gave him the impression that preaching wasn’t my vocation.)
* A pastor can expect criticism because people can be proud and ungrateful.
* A pastor can expect criticism because, well, it is a sinful and fallen world.But we as pastors often forget one more important reason:
* A pastor can expect criticism because it is part of God’s sanctification process—a tool that he uses to reveal idols and accelerate the pastor’s growth in humility.
Read and be helped by the rest of the post.
Darrin Patrick has graciously and honorably responded to MacArthur’s allegations that he is promoting rugged individualism and an entrepreneurial spirit in his book Church Planter
Well, we had another great Lord’s Day yesterday. In the AM, we looked at Matthew 6:10 in a sermon entitled Model Prayer (2). (There was a problem with the audio, but a manuscript will be available on Crestview’s Sermon Page.) Specifically, we looked at praying God-centered prayers for the Father’s reign and the Father’s will.
In the evening, my small group finished Thabiti’s book by seeing a healthy church member is a prayer warrior. In the course of discussing that, I mentioned some tools:
Valley of Vision
Andrew Case has the Scripture based prayer books for husbands
Operation World will email you an unreached people group each day.
Donald Whitney spoke of using the Psalms to pray each day.
Matthew Henry also has a Scriptural way to pray the Model Prayer.
Grab these tools and be helped by them.
Tomorrow, Lord willing, we will be looking at Matthew 6:10 in the AM service, which continues the God-centered direction begun in v.9. Think about your prayers, do they relate to the Father’s kingdom or His will? We need this corrective. See you then.