Every missionary effort starts with prayer. It cannot start with programs and preaching, or with carefully laid out plans. Those things are essential and needed, but the first and most important thing is always to pray.
“Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
It is interesting that Jesus, looking with the crowds and being filled with Compassion by God’s Spirit, tells His disciples to pray. He could’ve just sent them. After all, He has divine prerogative. Besides, they are His followers. They would certainly do whatever He wanted them to do, and they’d do that of their own free will. They had made the choice to follow, so it would not have been out of place for Him to tell them to go and make disciples right then and there. But He does not. He tells them instead to pray.
More than pray, He tells them to petition the Lord on account of two observations. Firstly that the harvest is ready, and secondly that there were not enough workers for it. Surely the Lord clearly knew that very well. Jesus knew it. His disciples may not have seen what He saw, but just before He told them to pray, He had just commented in their hearing, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” So we know that He both knew the time had come to begin the harvest, and He knew that there were not enough workers. Yet He asks the disciples to pray and tell God these same two facts.
The late Armin Gesswein said, “Prayer is not everything, but everything is by prayer.” What he meant is that everything in God’s Kingdom is by prayer. God – in His sovereignty – has chosen to only act in response to prayer. To then accomplish His will, we need to listen to Him prompt us as to what and how to best pray. That is true in every circumstance (to Armin’s point), but most especially true regarding the mission of God.
After all, the mission of God is His mission. To save lost souls is not something we ourselves can do. We can go, and we can preach, and we can minister in His Name. But we cannot quicken the dead, and all those we reach with the Gospel are dead in their sins. We cannot reach into someone’s soul and liven it just enough to hear the Good News. And even if we could, we could not arrange all the circumstances of their lives so that right then just happens to be the right time for the message to be heard, so that they willfully respond to the Good News. That is all God’s work. It is not our work, but it is a work we participate in by His great grace to us. Praise His Name, when we do participate, He is faithful to do His work!
But we must first participate by praying. Praying about the harvest, and praying about the need for workers. When we do that, the Lord begins the greater work. The work of changing us into people who see the world as He sees it, and who see the opportunity as He sees it. We pray, and He changes our hearts. Then we begin to see what participation really is. And only then can we participate in that harvest.
So we pray for the harvest, and we pray for workers of the harvest, so that we ourselves might be made into harvesters, and so that we might be partnered with the Lord of the harvest.
Our prayer for them becomes the very tool God uses to change us, so that we might be used in His harvest. Amen.
Before we pray that God would fill us, I believe we ought to pray Him to empty us.
D.L. Moody
APPLICATION: Intentionality
We first pray for the harvest. Then we pray for harvesters. Then we find ourselves ready to join in the harvest. So…pray!