Someone once said, “If you aim at nothing you are sure to hit it!” The same principle applies to how we pray for people. Sometimes our prayers can be so general that we would never really know how God answered. “God, save the lost of our community,” is a way out of taking responsibility to be ambassadors for Christ. When we don’t know their names, we often don’t take ownership of the command to go and share the good news of the gospel.
Several years ago, I served in a church with a couple that oversaw the local community corrections office. We would pray that God would use them to communicate the gospel message to those who had been in trouble with the law. That prayer changed dramatically, however, when I volunteered to help them. All of a sudden when I prayed for these men and women, they were no longer the faceless lost. To make a long story short, this is what happened to me:
- I began to pray specifically for each one of them by name.
- I could no longer pray without seeing their faces.
- I began to understand their unique struggles and asked God to meet their specific needs.
- I began to ask God to allow me to be the one to share Jesus with them and to see them get saved.
- I began to meet more of their friends, which I added by name to my prayer list.
- I saw some get saved and baptized as a result of my new awareness of who they really were, rather than just a group of people that all needed Jesus.
Flake emphasized the importance of praying by name in his later book, The True Functions of the Sunday School. He stated:
The name of every man, woman, and child in the community who is a stranger of grace should be in the possession of the church and the pastor. It is very much easier to become intensely concerned about the salvation of the souls of people when we know them personally, who they are and where they live.
Bill Smith may be only one of a hundred lost people in the community. However, the chances of winning Bill Smith to Christ are multiplied a hundredfold when we have his name, age, address, and know from his own testimony that he is a lost man. [Dwayne McCrary (2019). (p. 12). It Begins With Prayer – eBook. LifeWay Press. Retrieved from https://app.wordsearchbible.com]
Who are you praying for by name?
Written by Ken Beckner, Sunday School, Small Groups, Disciple Making, and VBS Director, Kansas-Nebraska Convention of Southern Baptist