By Ben Kingston, Pastor • Bethel Baptist Church, Lonedell, Mo.
Executive Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of six articles focused on “Prayer for Our Association.” (See the March 6 & 13 issues for the first two articles.) The Baptist Trumpet is partnering with Healthy Church Solutions and inviting your church to intentionally set aside time to pray for our association before the national meeting. See more details at the end of this article.
I received my Bible degree at Central Baptist College and originally served as the youth and music director at Bethel for eight years. After that, God directed me to Temple Baptist Church in Jonesboro for two years. I was called back to Bethel in December 1997, and we’ve here at Bethel ever since.
Prayer has been, is and, hopefully, forever will be a major part of my personal relationship with Christ. It has grown to become foundational in my ministry at Bethel to the point that I’m almost in tears writing this article because of the tender, almost indescribable raw emotion that comes from knowing what my prayer life was and what it is now. Here is my story of how God used one of the Healthy Church Solutions prayer initiatives to help strengthen my prayer life and the prayer life of the whole church:
Like all preachers, I certainly had utmost respect for prayer, but I was also a better talker than a participant. Looking back now, I wasn’t aware of the hypocrite I had become. I would preach about prayer and push prayer, but I shallowly pursued the Lover of My Soul in prayer. But God, in His kindness set me up with a great opportunity to have His audience.
Seemingly out of the blue, Larry Barker, with BMA Global and the director of Healthy Church Solutions, called me and asked what I thought about doing a prayer retreat with a few men. The vision was to come together in a small enough group that we could be poured into, then turn around and pour into others. The hope was to see a great movement of God through prayer in Missouri. So, two years ago, other area pastors and I participated in this prayer retreat led by Bro Larry.
Going into the retreat, I thought I was in a good place, and I was tempted to look at the experience as just another thing I should do because I’m a pastor. But the Holy Spirit made it very clear to me that this was going to be a life-changing experience.
Larry spoke with us for about 45 minutes, unpacking the acronym PRAY (Praise, Repent, Ask, Yield). P stands for “praise” and, after he spoke with us about what it looks like to truly humble ourselves and praise the Lord, he dismissed us for an hour to go be alone and just praise the Father. Right away, the Lord made it very clear to me that I had pushed Him to the side. He revealed to me that I had been operating my ministry and my prayer life on autopilot. God also revealed to me that He was not going to stand for it any longer. I did some real business with God during that first hour. I praised Him, but I also began to experience grief that leads to repentance.
The second session of the retreat was on repentance and, boy, did I repent! I repented of relegating my quiet time with God to a state of such poor intimacy. I’d been guilty of condensing my prayer time to a quick few minutes. I’d been guilty of doing the very thing I accuse my people of, which is just coming to church and checking it off a list of things to do. God took me to task — He was right and I was wrong.
The next day, Larry taught for another 45 minutes about the “A” in PRAY — “asking.” I spent an hour alone, seeking God and asking Him what He wanted me to ask of Him. Adrian Rogers teaches us in the Kingdom Authority lesson, “every prayer that originates from the throne room of God will be answered” and “we will never be over what’s under us, until we get under what is over us.” I began to ask, believing in the power of being in God’s presence, in the right posture that came out of praising and repenting.
The last letter “Y,” stands for “yield.” Larry spent another 45 minutes talking to us about what it means to yield to God and sent us off alone again to seek God’s will for an hour. To yield, we must submit to whatever outcome God wants, and be in agreement with anything He’s shown us during prayer.
In a nutshell, that was my experience at the retreat and praying in this way, but what happened afterward was even more life-changing! An event we were all experiencing around that time was COVID. It was significant in all our lives and in our churches. We needed to hear from God, and we had a way to actively do that, through prayer. Other significant things happened in my life that I won’t go into in this article, but trust me when I tell you, I desperately needed to seek God every day of my life. This desperation for God, and prayer like this, changed my preaching. It changed my ministry. I can tell you we have had our best years following that retreat than we have ever had in the past 20 years. It had to start with me and my intimacy with God.
God continues to grow my prayer life, and prayer time with others has also deepened. I pray with my wife every morning, and God has prompted us to add prayers for every child within our church. We name them by name, and every week, every member within our church knows that their families and their children are being prayed for by their pastor and his wife.
Just a few weeks ago, two of our laypeople brought a prayer ministry to our church called Maximum Prayer Effort based on Acts 5. If you do a deep dive into the chapter, it was written when Peter was thrown into prison. They gave their maximum effort to prayer, and look what God did! I believe we are at such a time as this and that we will see things we’ve never seen before if we are faithful to pray — great numbers of people coming to Christ, disciples being discipled to maturity and people reaching reproduction in the kingdom work for God. I am reminded what S.M. Lockridge said, “The church of Jesus Christ advances on her knees.” May the Word richly bless you and your church as you seek the Lord in prayer!
Details about the Call to Pray for Our Association
Here is the schedule leading up to April 16-18. Be on the lookout for specific ways to pray for our association in the upcoming weeks and start planning now how you will participate on the Sundays of April 7 and April 14.
• March 27 — An article with specific ways to intentionally make prayer the heartbeat of your church and ministry.
• April 3 — Specific ways to pray for our association this week.
• April 10 — Specific ways to pray for our association this week.
We ask every church in our association to commit to praying for our association. We invite you to devote a specific time of prayer during the morning worship services on April 7 and 14 (the two weekends before the meeting). If you are led to do more, other possibilities would be to organize a dedicated time of prayer (i.e., a special prayer service, all members commit to pray at the same time every day, 24 hours of prayer, etc.) outside the morning service sometime during one or both of those weekends — whatever would work for your church.
However you choose to participate, we would love to know that you will choose to do so. Please email Heidi Sorrells with Healthy Church Solutions at heidi@bmaglobal.org and let her know that you will join in and how you plan to participate. She can also provide you with additional resources for organizing your church’s prayer times, if needed.
