We live in perilous times. Whether we realize it or not we all live and work and minister in the middle of a spiritual battlefield. Spiritual warfare is taking place all around us. There is a cosmic battle in the unseen realm where demons and angels struggle for the allegiance of the souls of men, women and children.
[Read more…] about Powerful Weapons
Going it Alone
Woody Shoemaker
Friday Woody Shoemaker stepped into my office. It’s always a good part of my day when Woody stops in. We have both been pastors for years and together we solve the world’s problems and swap old pastor stories. When he stepped in I was thinking about what I was going to say later that evening to the men in Grosse Pointe. My job was to convince men who were already swamped with responsibilities that they should help form a men’s ministry in the church.
Recruits or Results of Prayer?
When I was asked to do the job I currently have I knew it was humanly impossible for me to do what needed to be done. I told Mr. Gothard so.
I said, “I feel I am inadequate to do what you need me to do.”
He smiled and said, “Well, good. That way you will have to rely on the Lord.”
[Read more…] about Recruits or Results of Prayer?
Pastoral Epistle
Here is a little bonus. About five years ago I send a pastoral epistle to the church that I founded with a few other families in beautiful central Ohio. Here is that letter:
[Read more…] about Pastoral Epistle
Praying Men
Re-posted from July 2005
When I was growing up my Dad pastored a little country church on a edge of a tiny village in Ohio. In that church young and old alike were together for prayer meeting on Wednesday night. We would sing a hymn or two and Dad would teach and take prayer requests. He would read a missionary prayer letter or two and then divide into two groups. The ladies and the girls would come to the front and the men and boys would go to the back. We would get on our knees and pray.
The image of men on their knees in prayer on a summer evening, windows open to the cool night, is still sweet to my memory. I was about ten years old. I watched the men when they would pray, squeezing their eyes together and pouring out their souls to God. One evening I watched one of the older men of the church kneeling at his pew. Tears ran down his face and dripped off his chin while he prayed.
When I think back on those summer nights in prayer meeting I am reminded of what E. M. Bounds wrote on praying men over a hundred years ago:
“WE are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God’s plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men… When God declares that “the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him,” he declares the necessity of men and his dependence on them as a channel through which to exert his power upon the world.
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use — men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men — men of prayer.” (E. M. Bounds, Power through Prayer)
We have camps and conferences and clubs for children. We have children’s books, software, video games, and cleaver Christian films aimed at them. We have catchy music and Christian action heroes for children. We have singing vegetables and Bible action hero dolls. But more then anything children need to see their fathers bent in humility before the Lord. They need to know some praying men.
Ken Pierpont
Riverfront Character Inn
Flint, Michigan
July 5, 2005
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