"The Picture of a Praying Church" - Pastor Greg Addison - Jan. 7, 2024

Ministering to the heart of Western Arkansas's River Valley for over 165 years, welcome to Chapter and First, the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.

You'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg, our ministry staff, and guest speakers.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you, Jacob, and choir and orchestra and deacons for serving us.

It's just incredible to come and to spend that time in unity together, praying and worshiping, and thanking the Lord for salvation.

And I want to build on that this morning.

I want you to turn with me in your Bibles to Acts chapter 13.

Acts 13 · chapter mention

And we're going to do uh something a little bit different this month, something we uh have not done in my tenure here.

I know you've done this in the past, but it's an exciting time for us to come together and we're going to take a journey together.

So we are starting a prayer series this month.

We're calling the house of prayer, because Jesus said that our that his house is to be a house of prayer.

And so we're going to take a journey together this month where we're going to each day pray, and I'll walk you through that in just a minute, pray the same verse, praying the same theme each day as a church family.

And as you pray each day for your church and what God is doing in our midst, you know that you'll be doing that alongside every other person who's a part of our church.

We're also going to talk about this month re-invigorating and recasting that vision for our prayer ministry.

Now, today, here in Acts chapter 13, I want to just set this up briefly and just kind of talk you through what we're doing.

Acts 13 · chapter mention

I hear pastors a lot of times when they'll say, Hey, we're going to become a praying church, and we're going to do this to become a praying church, whatever.

Praise the Lord, First Baptist here in Fort Smith.

We have a great heritage of prayer.

We have a heritage of prayer warriors.

We have people who have been faithfully praying for our church for years and years.

We've had times where we've had, you know, an incredibly robust prayer ministry and all of that.

And as we've settled down through a lot of the transitions of new staff and Janet and I coming and all of that, it's time to build on that heritage and move forward in that next stage of life of the prayer ministries for our church.

And the reason that we do that is what we're talking about today.

It is inherent in the life of a church to be a praying church.

It is appropriate that our church has a heritage of prayer ministries and prayer warriors woven through its fabric.

That's why our church is still here effectively sharing the gospel and being a lighthouse after so many decades and generations.

It is because of that DNA of prayer that has been woven through our history.

And we want to build on that and maintain that through the next generation.

We don't want to stop what has happened throughout the life of the church.

We want to continue and build on it.

And here, just for a moment, I want to show you this is the church in this city called Antioch.

The gospel has spread here to this area and region of the world.

I would encourage you, if you have a few minutes, to read in Acts chapter 11, the birth of this church.

Acts 11 · chapter mention

It's an incredible picture and story of how this church was born and founded.

Just to give you a quick nutshell of it, what happened was persecution was happening intensely in Jerusalem, where the most of the Christians were at that time as it was beginning to break out.

And there were many who were pushed out of Jerusalem and even out of Israel because of the intensity of the persecution.

And the Bible said people who were being persecuted landed in Antioch.

But because they were people of Jesus and their faith was real, they landed in Antioch and they just started telling folks about Christ, and people started getting saved, and there were enough of them that got saved that all of a sudden they became a church.

That's how churches ought to be built.

Amen.

That's what ought to be happening.

And so the Bible says now, as the church, here in chapter 13, here's what their church looked like.

In the church that was at Antioch, there were prophets and teachers.

Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, Lucius the Serene, and Menaean, a close friend of Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul.

As they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, in other words, that's what they did was they prayed and fasted.

As they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said to them, Set apart from me, Barnabas and Saul, for the work I have called them to.

Then after they had fasted and prayed, they laid hands on them and they sent them off.

Verse 4 begins with just this phrase, being sent out by the Holy Spirit.

You see, here, inherent in their church was a committed and consistent prayer DNA through all that they did.

And so here's what I want to just show you briefly why we're moving into this time and why I'd like for us to really embrace this and do this as a church family.

The picture of a praying church is this praying together was literally how they did church.

I mean, look what it says.

They came together, they were praying, and it says, as they were praying, as they were ministering to the Lord and fasting.

You don't just wake up one day and think, hey, I'm going to do that.

This is an inherent part of their church.

These are people who've been saved.

They are many of them brand new Christians because they got saved when some weird Jewish people showed up, started telling them about this guy who died on the cross and rose again to save them from their sins.

And they're learning how to be a church, they're learning how to come together, they're learning how to share the gospel, and foundational and inherent to that journey was consistently praying.

It was seriously praying.

When they're fasting, man, you know they're serious about their prayer.

I mean, you have a bunch of Baptists who don't show up and eat at church.

Like we're serious about spiritual matters.

You know what I'm saying?

I mean, it's incredible.

They are they are committed and deeply working.

This is inherent in their church.

This is what they did.

There's no doing church without this.

And it's everyone.

They list these leaders and the nature of that.

And if they're leading, they're teaching other people to pray.

And the church is praying.

And so we want to take this time where we come together and we begin to reaffirm, again, in our generation, as previous generations before us, that this is what we do, that this is how we do church, through consistent, committed, and serious prayer.

The second thing you see is when they get together, something special happens.

As they begin to pray, that is when God speaks and directs their church.

So as we are coming together and praying as a church family, we are praying because we're expecting the Lord to speak to us.

Here's what the Bible says.

As they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said to them.

Prayer is communicating with the Lord.

It is talking to Him, but it is also listening and Him speaking to us.

How are we going to reach more students in our middle schools and high schools?

How are we going to help impact the gospel and the spread of the gospel at UAFS?

How are we going to find the platforms where God is going to plant us to reach people for Christ?

How are we going to do that?

Well, he wants to tell us, and he wants us to listen so we can hear him when he directs us.

And so as we come together as a church, we are coming together to pray, not just because we're talking to the Lord, but even more importantly, because we want him to direct us.

We want him to share with us.

Again, there's a lot of ways to do church, and there's a lot of things we can do.

And we have a lot of talented people, and we have heritage, and we have resources, and we have opportunities.

We don't want to just go pick stuff and start doing it.

We want to do what God wants to do.

We want to do it how he wants to do us, we want to do it as he wants to do us, we want to follow his direction in how we're sharing the gospel and what we're doing.

Also, what you see inherent in this time when we are praying and God is directing, if God's heart was to send Jesus as our Savior, if Jesus' heart was to seek and to save the lost, then every direction that comes from the Lord is going to direct us in the direction of his heart, which is reaching lost folks.

It is spreading and advancing the gospel.

And so as we are praying as a church and we are receiving the direction of the Lord, it's what keeps us on track as a gospel spreading and sharing church as we hear God speak and direct and guide.

Then it's not just how they do church, it is how God directs us.

But once he directs us, we have to be obedient and accomplish what he directs us to do.

And we see here that they accomplished their work by praying together.

Now, this is awesome right here.

Bunch of type A leader people like us.

It'd be real easy to do this.

Lord, here I am.

Put the instructions on the bulletin board, and when you give us the bulletin board, we take it off and we just run out and go get busy trying to get it done, right?

That's not how this works.

The Lord directs us to his work, but it's his work, and he is the power of the work.

He is the empowering that causes people to save as we go out in his name and sharing Jesus.

And so look at what they what it says.

They got a clear word from the Lord set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work I've called them to.

And that work, if you've studied this passage before, you know that this they are being sent out as missionaries.

And so God has called Paul and Barnabas, or Saul and Barnabas to be missionaries.

He's called this church to support those missions in their mission.

And so he is saying, I want you to build a missionary structure in your church.

And now you're going to take offerings and support and create prayer bases, and you're going to send them out, and they're going to go out and become missionaries and plant churches, and you're going to support them from your midst.

So he's establishing this mission sending of a church.

It's why we have men that we are praying for and calling to go in February to help build that pavilion around the church in El Salvador that we've helped stir up and we're seeing God plant there.

It's why we're sending people in March to go help Pastor Joel in London and in that area, because we we are a gospel church.

God is directing us to do that, and so we need to go as He's directed us.

But look at what it says, how they did it.

Then after they had prayed and fasted, they sent them all.

After they had prayed and fasted.

So we don't just take the assignment off the bulletin board and go get busy and go run out there and do it.

We know what God has called us to do, and because it's his work, we want to do it in his power, in his timing.

We want to stay on track with his direction.

And so we pray over our work before and as we're doing it, just like we have prayed for the direction in what to do.

Everything we do must be covered in prayer, must be wrapped in the prayers of God's people, calling out to the Lord, telling him we depend on him, telling him we need him, confessing we're obedient to what he's called us to do.

And Lord, use this time in your way to do this ministry.

Prayer together is how we do church.

It's how we hear the direction of the Lord, and it's how we accomplish what we're doing.

So we're going to have a season here in January.

We're going to really practice that and exercise those muscles together.

The first way we're going to do that is if you came in, you should have gotten a little booklet that looks like this.

If you have yours, pull it out, grab hold of it, hold it up.

I want to see everybody got one.

If somebody didn't get one, I want you to feel left out.

And so you can get one on your way out, okay?

That's good.

And what this is, it's a daily prayer guide.

And you'll see on the front each week as I open a topic of prayer.

So today we've talked about the picture of the church praying together.

So this week we're going to be praying together as a church, the priority of being a praying church.

And so what will happen is this is built on the brew sort of system we've talked about here before.

Believe God has something to say to you.

When you have a verse, believe God has something to say to you.

Read and repeat that verse over and over and over.

Then you slow down, take each word, pay attention to it, and then you write down what God has spoken to you from that verse.

And if you'll look at that first page, day one, you will see right there what it looks like.

There's a reminder of the brew process in the front there, but if you'll go to day one, you'll see what it looks like.

So what we're going to do, each person, at some point during the day, whenever it's best for you and your schedule, I want you to take that verse out and I want you to brew it.

Spend a little time with it.

Read and repeat it.

Pay attention to each word.

And as you do that, pray to the Lord and listen to him speak to you.

First question, just in your way as God talks to you, what is he telling you about prayer and the Lord and what's the picture there?

And then listen to him talk to you.

And in that second deal, what is he telling you?

Write it down.

Listen.

Capture that.

Does he have a question?

Does he have a thought?

Does he have a direction for you?

Does he have something he wants you to share?

Now, why are we doing this?

I want you to look at this first verse here.

And this is a picture I want to help you with tomorrow, when you start tomorrow.

But I want to help you with a picture that I want to be riveted in our minds as a church as we go through this journey.

Here's what he says, Romans 8, verse 34.

Romans 8:34

Who is the one who condemns?

Christ Jesus is the one who died, but even more, he has been raised from the dead.

When Jesus was raised from the dead, what happened?

He was ascended to heaven, and there he has an activity.

He also is at the right hand of God and intercedes for us.

Right now, whatever's going on in your life, by the covenant promise in his shed blood, he is praying for you.

Now, how does that relate to the church?

Well, in a Christian's life, when you're saved, what happens?

God takes you and He begins to work in your life.

He takes things in, He puts things in, takes things out, transforming us to become more like Jesus.

And every day, as we grow, as we let Him work, as we pray, as we study His Word, as we're obedient to His instructions, as we're doing those things, what should happen is every week we look a little more like Jesus.

Next week I look more like Jesus than I did this week.

Next month, I look more like Jesus than I did this month.

Next year, I look more like Jesus than I did this year.

Now here's the picture, though.

If you're going to be transformed into the image of Jesus, what does Jesus look like?

He looks like someone praying.

He's praying for you.

And if we are being transformed in the image of Jesus, that must include this picture of Jesus.

The Bible also describes the church as the body of Christ.

And if the body of Christ is seated at the supernatural physical body of Jesus is seated at the right hand praying to the Father, then what does the spiritual body of Christ, the church, look like?

It must look like we are seated at the feet of the Father interceding in prayer.

It's inherent in who we are.

And so that's all you're going to do is take a moment each day and you're going to pray through that.

Now here's another thing I want you to do.

I want everybody to see it as you see each other in Walmart, restaurants, wherever you are, ball games, basketball games, whatever, even if you're at a Razorback game.

It probably helps to pray at Razorback games, right?

And here's the other thing that'll help.

You want to stop each other and go, hey, did you do your reading today?

Hey, what did the Lord tell you in your reading today?

That's really good when the referees do what they did in the last game at the Razorback deal.

It's good to remind everybody to be spiritual in the middle of that, right?

And so here it is.

We want to encourage each other, strengthen each other.

We're praying together, share together.

In your Sunday school groups, take a minute, take a moment, and just stop and share.

Find a prayer partner in your group wherever you are or the ministry where you serve and say, hey, we're going to be praying together.

So we're going to text each other or call or email or whatever it is you do in your world.

When you have coffee together, whatever it is, take a minute and encourage each other, hold each other accountable.

Let's do this together.

Let's come together like that church in Antioch so that we can become like Jesus seated at the right hand of the Father in prayer.

So I want to encourage you to do that.

If you don't have one, get it.

And take a moment, a few minutes each day, and pray that alongside with your brothers and sisters in Christ.

And let's seek the Lord's face together in prayer and see how he directs us into this new year.

The second thing we want to do is just as it says again in this picture of a praying church, there are leaders who are leading out in prayer.

It says very clearly here that there were leaders.

There were pastors and apostles and all of that, and they are praying, right?

In the church that was at Antioch, there were prophets and teachers, and it lists them by name.

It calls out these lead prayer warriors who are leading the church in prayer.

And so we have had a history of a prayer ministry and all of that here, and as we talked about when we got closer with the hallways and moving the prayer room over here and all of that, we really want to take some time now and re-reinvigorate that prayer ministry in our church.

And so here's as we've been praying through this, we want to just grab some pictures that help you understand it.

So we're going to start the working title that we've been working with is the prayer force.

We're in an Air Force community, and that seemed to be appropriate.

It also is appropriate because in Scripture, in the New Testament especially, Paul often used military pictures and soldiering to illustrate the battles that we walk through, the spiritual battles as God's people.

He gives in Ephesians chapter 6 this incredible picture of the full armor of God that we put on, that we are to be able to stand against the devil.

Ephesians 6 · chapter mention

And what happens is, if you go back and read Ephesians 6, we put on the armor of God, and the very next thing it says is, hear your prayer lists, and you begin praying.

So what we are doing in that picture of going to battle, we are praying in that spiritual battle.

And that's where we get this heritage in church life of talking about prayer warriors.

So we thought this military picture was good.

As I prayed through and looked at all the different ways to do that, and all the different branches of service and all of that, I just I've just come back to this picture of a B-17 bomber.

Here's what happens in that deal, right?

If you go to the army and you look at that, you have generals and they're over here and they're directing them and they're directing them and they're directing them, and you got all that stuff going on.

Now you have ranks and you have roles in a bomber, but here's what happens.

When that bomber takes off, you are ten men bonded together for that battle.

You take off together, you depend on everybody on that plane to do their role together, and you either die or come home together.

And I thought, what a beautiful picture of us as a church family praying together.

Now that's just a particular, that's a fascinating airframe, and it's pretty incredible.

And I'll use some illustrations of that going on.

But in that bomber right there, in that picture, you can begin to see what some of you can picture in your mind waist gunners and tail gunners and top gunners and ball turret gunners.

I actually had a deacon in my first church where I pastored who was a ball turret gunner on a B 17 in World War II.

It was awesome.

Fascinating guy, about that tall.

He said, that was the only job in the military that I could do, but I was short enough to fit in the ball turret.

It's right, and so it's an incredible thing.

But what happens on that plane as it functions, everyone has roles.

And so we are describing this prayer force ministry by the roles of that deal.

Now, here's what I want to do on the last Sunday night.

Well, let's talk about the roles for a minute, and then I'll pull when that is.

Last Sunday night in January, we're going to have an organizational meeting on Sunday night for you to commit to that.

So here, let me kind of describe to you what happens.

When the plane takes off, somebody's in charge.

Those are the pilots.

And so we are working to build a leadership team and a task force that would help lead our prayer force alongside our staff.

Lay folks in our church, prayer warriors, some deacons, we're going to have a group in there that sort of direct the plane as it goes.

But as you study these bombers, there's another key person in that role, and that's the navigator.

The navigator is the one who ensured that the plane understood its mission, got to where the mission was, and got home.

If the plane ever got lost or off track, it was the navigator who fixed it.

The other thing fascinating about navigators, they had to know the role of everybody else on the plane, and they had to understand how to get in and man the gun in every one of those machine gun positions around that bomber.

So those navigators, they are key in the success of this plane accomplishing its mission.

And so we've chosen that illustration, the navigators, to set up this role.

We want to have weekly time slots, and the church has done this in the past.

Some of you are still faithfully filling your slots, and so you're just you're already in and you keep doing what you're doing.

This group, we want to have time slots, either half an hour or an hour, that you sign up for during the week, and it's your spot every time.

Pastor, I'm going to take Wednesday at 11 a.m.

or I'm going to take Thursday night at 9 p.m.

or whatever it is.

And we're just going to start off going from 8 in the morning to 10 at night.

And so we're going to ask folks in our church to commit to those time slots and to pray throughout the week.

And you'll have a specific set of prayer requests we want to pray every time we pray.

We want to pray for people to be saved.

We want to pray for an evangelistic journey in our church.

We're going to pray for God's protection and direction.

And then you'll have another list of prayer requests that change as things are going on in the life of the church.

But you're going to meet there in your house or whatever.

What we've done is during the office hours, the prayer room will be open, and we're going to establish a way to do this with a virtual prayer room where you can pray in your house.

So some of our homebound folks love to be a part of this.

You may want to choose a night slot.

You don't have to come up here into this physical spot.

You can tap on, get your request for the day, and fill your spot.

We're also going to recruit a group of people to man the prayer room during the service every Sunday.

Every Sunday they're praying their way through the service.

Now, why are we doing this?

It is that group of people that are praying consistently, that are praying every day, just like in the city of Antagon, that keep us on track.

They keep that prayer line open with the Lord.

They keep our voice before Him.

They keep His voice before us.

They are the ones that know what's going on.

They're getting those prayer requests, and they are keeping us on track.

They are navigating us as a church on our mission.

And in the third group, these are gunners.

This is my favorite group right here.

You know, the waist gunners and the tail gunner and the ball turret gunner, they had certain things they were doing when they took off, but a lot of it, they were just waiting till it was time to go to battle.

And when they got in the range of the enemy, they all manned their stations.

Now that B-17 bomber, they named it this the Flying Fortress.

And they named it that because of the incredible amount of armament as you had eight of those ten menning positions all around that plane, shooting in every direction with twin-mounted, sometimes, sometimes single-mounted, 50-caliber machine guns, has a bullet as long as my hand.

It's incredible the force.

And they would fly those planes and they would put them in box formations where you had four planes with 10 guns each covering each other.

It was incredible the amount of firepower, protection, and strength that plane had.

That's why they call it a flying fortress.

And when it was time to go to battle, man, everybody took a gun.

And they were fighting and they were fighting that plane through the enemy and everything else to get to their mission to accomplish what they had been ordered to do.

And so there are times for us as a church, for example, during the upcoming Defrost retreat for our students, during vacation Bible school, during the mission trip to El Salvador, during the mission trip to London, at certain times when certain committees may be meeting.

There are times in the life of our church, and there will be, as we're growing and as we're working, that there are just spiritual things going on.

And we need to have more prayer and more focused prayer for more people in that time.

And you say, isn't that the role of the whole church?

Yes, it is.

But somehow we have to create that method, and somehow we have to train that commitment level.

And so we want a group of people to sign up to be gunners.

You may not be praying every day at every Tuesday at 10 a.m.

a slot like a navigator would, but man, when it's time to pray and you're called to prayer, you'll receive an email and a text and a call to prayer, and you know, man, it is time for me to man my proverbial machine gun, and I need to pour the skies full of my prayers.

And when we can pray that way and we're building that as a church, can you imagine the strength of that prayer force as we pray and call out to heaven for us to see people say?

Now, we're going to have an organizational meeting on Sunday night, January the 28th.

There'll be a table out in the visitor area.

You can RSVP to that dinner.

It's$5 box lunch.

We're doing box lunches because we're going to war.

This is a battle ready.

Get your instructions meeting, right?

And so you come and we'll be there an hour and a half or so, whatever it is, however long it takes, and we'll walk through these in detail.

We'll train how we're going to do this, and that is when you will commit.

I'm in.

Pastor, I'm a gunner.

Pastor, I'm a navigator.

Here's my spot.

And we'll and we'll build from there.

So each time this week, each Sunday this month, you'll have a chance to sign up.

You'll have a chance to pray through this.

We'll talk through this some more.

You'll get a chance to sign up for this.

But here's what I want to see.

Man, I want to see people who are excited about that commitment level and they dive in to help us pray.

Because the picture of a church is the picture of Jesus kneeling at the feet of our Father, ever living to make intercession.

And we're doing this because we believe in what we did with the gospel.

We believe Jesus saved.

We've shared the gospel in song.

I've shared it verbally.

We've shared it here.

I told you at the end of the service you'd have an opportunity to trust Christ as your Savior.

So everyone to bow your heads.

We want to close with an invitation this morning.

And if you've never trusted Christ as your Savior, you want to be saved.

It is a blessing to have your sins forgiven.

It is a deep truth in our lives to know that we have a relationship with Jesus and we're never alone.

And every promise he makes to us is sealed in his blood.

It is an existential, foundational question in life, what happens to us in eternity, and to know that that is settled because Jesus has saved you is life-altering and eternity altering.

To be a part of a church family that prays together, seeks God together, you get the chance to be a part of a family like that when you give your life to Christ.

If you've never trusted Christ as your Savior, I'm going to pray.

God's people are going to stand and sing.

We're going to invite you to come to Jesus.

Lord, we love you and we thank you.

We thank you for the picture of Jesus praying for us today.

If there's someone who wants to be in that relationship this morning, who knows they need to be saved and they want to be in the position of Jesus being their prayer warrior, praying for them.

It's in his saving name we pray, and all God's people said.

Please know we want to minister to you and pray for you.

Send an email to contact us at fsfbc.org and let us pray for you and help you in any way we can.

Thank you for listening to chapter and first, the Bible teaching ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.