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Field Notes of an Ordinary Pastor

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004: PRAYING FOR A LARGER OUTPOURING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

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004: Praying for a larger outpouring of the Holy Spirit

An elder at the Metropolitan Tabernacle wrote to Spurgeon with 10 suggestions about how to give practical expression to a desire for a larger outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the church and congregation.

1. Call a meeting of the Deacons and Elders of the church for special prayer for their own families.

2. Fix an evening to meet the older children of the members of the church to urge them to immediate attention to the salvation of their souls.

3. Call a church meeting for special prayer for a still larger blessing on the ministry.

4. Hold a general meeting of the church for thanksgiving for the blessings enjoyed in the past.

5. Invite from the pulpit all the members of the church to set apart, in their own homes, one particular day (which you should name) for special prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

6. Invite the Deacons and Elders and some of the members of the church to open their homes from 7 to 9pm for special prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

7. Set apart an evening in which yourself, with the Elders, should meet all those in the congregation who are as yet undecided, for special exhortation and prayer, urging them to immediate decision for Christ.

8. With the Elders, meet the students (of the Pastor’s College), the Sunday School teachers, the Tract Visitors, the Classes for special prayer and conference, that their labours may be made more effectual in the salvation of sinners.

9. Print out a selection of promises from the Bible which we might plead before God on this matter.

10. With fruit expected, have the Elders ready to see inquirers after the services.

Alongside his suggestions, he thinks “it is very desirable that our Monday Evening Prayer-meeting should be even better attended than it is.”

Do we pray enough together as a local church for a larger outpouring of the Holy Spirit?  Would any of these suggestions work in our particular context?

Is it our desire that our evening prayer meeting should be even better attended than it is?

(Photo: Julia Joppien)

003: SERMON PRAYING

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003: Sermon Praying

These 8 prayers from Mike McKinley I have found helpful to use during sermon preparation since they appeared in an article on the 9Marks website back in 2012.

1. Lord, please help me to understand the meaning of this text and how it points to Christ.

2. Lord, please increase my love for the people who will hear this sermon.

3. Lord, please give me wisdom to apply this text to the lives of the people in our congregation.

4. Lord, please use this passage to help me grasp and love the gospel more so that I might help my hearers do the same.

5. Lord, please help me to see how this passage confronts the unbelief of my hearers.

6. Lord, please help me to be obedient to the demands of this passage. Help me to enter the pulpit having already submitted my life to this truth before I preach it.

7. Lord, by your Spirit please help me to preach this sermon with the necessary power and with appropriate affections.

8. Lord, please use this sermon to bring glory to your name, joy to your people, and salvation to the lost.

(Photo: Julia Joppien)

002: WILDERNESS

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002: Wilderness

“As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept, I dreamed a dream.” (John Bunyan)

When the Israelites were saved from slavery in Egypt, they didn’t immediately enter into the Promised Land.  They had to wander through the wilderness first (and ended up wandering a lot longer than they expected).

In a similar way, the church when saved from sin and death, doesn’t immediately enter the Promised Land of the new heaven and a new earth.  She has her own wilderness to make her way through.

The wilderness is the present world.  It is life outside the Garden of Eden.  It is enemy territory and full of temptations, trials, difficulties and challenges.  It is where Jesus’ followers are regarded as the scum and dregs of society.

John Bunyan in the opening line of Pilgrim’s Progress reminds us that life now for the Christian won’t be easy.  It is a journey through the wilderness.  But one day we enter the Promised Land that Jesus is preparing for us.  We will be home, and it is to this future certainty we must keeping looking forward to.

(Photo: Julia Joppien)

001: MISCELLANIES

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001: Miscellanies

I have notes everywhere.  In notebooks, on scraps of paper, in Evernote, on a no-frills note-taking app on my iPhone, in random word docs.

I’m sure some of those notes will be useful for the tasks I’ve got on this week.

If only I could find the relevant ones.

The other day, I was skimming the latest roundup post at the Redeeming Productivity blog and something caught my attention.  It was a link to a video with this title – Master Plan for Bible Notetaking – where Matthew Everhard compares Jonathan Edwards’ method for Bible note-taking with his own.  I was intrigued by Edward’s method which Everhard has adapted and found he had previously done another vid on this topic – Best Bible Note-Taking System: Jonathan Edwards’s Miscellanies.

Could it be that Miscellanies holds the key to organising all my notes in a way that is actually useful?

Edward’s Miscellanies was a collection of notes, thoughts, observations, and insights that he had.  Some of these notes were short, others were a few pages long.  But here’s the key, each of them were numbered, given titles, and cross-referenced, with the number of the miscellanies put in the margin of his Bible if it was relevant to the text.

I wonder if a digital form of a Miscellanies (in Evernote, on this blog, or both) would work.  For all my notes (going forward), to be numbered, given titles, then added to a table of contents, and with the number of any insight on a passage of Scripture put into the margin of my Bible.

This looks like the note-taking system I’ve been looking for.  I now have one miscellanies on Miscellanies to be added to.

(Photo: Julia Joppien)