Pray the Word

Sermon Summary / Transcript

In last Sunday’s sermon, Jason showed us from 1st Kings 8:22-53 that prayer is to have a central place in our worship. We see this demonstrated in God’s word. When Solomon gathered God’s people they prayed, when they prayed they prayed together, and when they prayed together they prayed different kinds of prayers.

Clearly God wants us to pray. And so when we gather, we too pray, we too pray together, and we too pray different kinds of prayers…

We pray prayers of invocation, asking God to meet with us. And we should be invoking God’s presence not just as we open the service but all week long as we ready our hearts for Sunday worship.

We pray prayers of adoration and thanksgiving, recounting who God is and the things he has done for us.

We pray prayers of confession, corporately and privately. Because we love the gospel, we love to confess the sin that our God forgives. To recognize and confess sin is to wade into the deep end of the gospel!

We pray pastoral prayers, prayers of supplication for the whole congregation. And while the confessional prayer is reflective and inward, this congregational prayer is outward, made on behalf of those around us.

We offer up a prayer for the tithes and offerings, a prayer of illumination before the sermon. and a prayer of application following it.

And finally, we end each gathering with a benediction, a covenantal blessing that we’ve shared with God’s people down through the ages.

Jason also reminded us that prayer is hard work, that while struggle in prayer is no shame, prayerlessness is. We learn to pray by listening to our elders and pastors pray and by joining with them in agreement. And while many prayers have specific places in our church’s order of service, we should be finding ourselves praying throughout the service.

We worship according to the Word, and so we sing the word, preach the word, see the word in the sacraments, and pray the Word. The church is built on the words of the apostles and prophets and on Jesus Christ the chief cornerstone, the Word made flesh. We are praying people because we are Word people!