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Stumbling through prayer
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Prayer lifts our souls to God. Sometimes it also lifts our spirits because our misplaced words make us laugh.


One Sunday in a church that I served previously, the ushers prepared to take the offering, and an usher offered up this prayer: “Father, help us to ... help us to make it through ... help us to make it through Brother Bob’s sermon. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”


There was a slight chuckle in the congregation, and after church the usher came up to me and said, “Brother Bob, my prayer didn’t come out right. I was gonna pray for the Lord to help us make it through our troubles, and I also wanted to pray for your sermon, and it just all came out wrong.” Hmm, I wonder.


Reminds me of the man who was asked to pray and said, “Lord, be with all the sick and tired of the church.”


Another fellow I heard about was sleeping during the sermon, when a prankster next to him decided to punch him in the side, and whispered loudly in his ear, “The preacher just called on you to offer the benediction!” So the man stood up in the middle of the pastor’s sermon, and proceeded to dismiss the congregation in prayer. The preacher had no choice but to end it right there and let everybody go home.


Then there are other folks who are fully aware of what they’re praying, but they overdo it. Once when the great evangelist Dwight L. Moody was holding an evangelistic meeting, a pious preacher offered a very long prayer. In fact, the prayer went on for so long, that people began to get restless. Moody, concerned that the service needed to be full of life and enthusiasm, finally stood up, motioned to the music leader, and said, “Brother, would you lead us in a song while our brother finishes his prayer?”


Sometimes we forget that the purpose of prayer is not to impress other people or to signal the end or beginning of a religious meeting. Prayer is communication with God. Jesus said that hypocrites prayed to be seen by men (Matthew 6:1), and told us not to think we’ll be heard by long, babbling prayers (Matthew 6:7). The Lord’s Prayer, a prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, only takes about 15 seconds.


While Jesus got up very early to pray (Mark 1:35) and even prayed all night long (Luke 6:12), Jesus himself never prayed long prayers in large public gatherings. His prayers were short and to the point, just like normal conversation would be. Prayer does not have to include flowery words, either. In fact, you don’t have to have words at all!


Romans 8:26 says that the Holy Spirit helps us when we don’t know what to pray, “with groans that words cannot express.” As Max Lucado says, “Pray all the time. If necessary, use words.” When we do, God will hear. And smile.


(Copyright 2012 by Bob Rogers. Email: brogers@fbcrincon.com. Read this column each Friday in the Herald. Visit my blog at www.bobrogers.me.)

Is there a church for a big woman with an itch?
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A pastor was called to be guest preacher at a church. He knew this church was different when the congregation ended every line of the hymn with the shout of “yeehah!”


As he stood to preach, he noticed that people were spread out on the pews. He would see a person, then a space, then another person, and another space. He wondered why nobody sat next to another person, when he noticed on the pew beside each person was a cowboy hat.


Another time this same preacher was invited to a new church in the city. He was surprised to see that everybody there looked like they had fallen face first into a tackle box, because they had piercings and earrings on every part of the body imaginable. A rock band was playing alternative music on the stage.


As different as these two churches were, they were both growing and reaching people for Christ.


Years ago I was pastor of a small country church in the backwoods of Mississippi. There was another Baptist church just five miles away in the town (population 600). The pastor’s wife at the town church asked me, “Why don’t our two churches merge?” I said, “There are people in my church who would not feel comfortable or fit in at your town church.” She said, “Oh, come on. We’re a small town church. What could be so different?”


I said, “Well, I got one really big woman in my church who, when she gets to feeling an itch, she pulls her dress halfway up and she scratches herself.”


The eyes of this pastor’s wife got really big and she said, “I see what you mean.”


I forgot to tell her about another woman in my church who saw a roach running across the wood floor, so she stomped on it with her bare foot, laughed and shouted, “Aha! I got him!”


Yep, the culture was definitely different where I was pastor.


Jesus upset the religious establishment because He crossed cultural barriers. He loved to eat with tax collectors and Gentiles and other strange people. Jesus walked into the land of Samaria, full of half-breed Jews who worshiped in weird ways and talked different and smelled different.


Jesus walked right up to a Samaritan woman at a well and started talking her language. He accepted her culture, but he let her know her sinful lifestyle had to change. Soon she had the whole town following Jesus (see John 4).


So what cultural barrier is keeping somebody in your community from hearing the gospel? If you tear down the cultural barriers to share Christ in your neighborhood, you may hear the angels shouting, “Yeehah!”


Copyright 2014 by Bob Rogers. Email: brogers@fbcrincon.com. Read this column each Friday in the Herald. Visit my blog at www.bobrogers.me.