Praying them in

I am a firm believer in the power of prayer. When God's people agree on something and pray about it God honors our prayers. I had to get that all out on the table so I won't be misunderstood with the following comments.

Over the years I have attended a plethora of Wednesday night prayer services. Many of you know the routine: opening hymn, prayer, announcements, and then we get to the prayer time. However, we seem to regularly spend more time talking about the prayer requests than we do praying.

In our church prayer meetings we pray mostly for sick people who are members of our church, for the military, for family, for friends of the members of our church, and an occasional mention of “all the missionaries.”  There's nothing wrong with praying for sick people or family and friends. Recently while having my cancer treatments in Florida I relished the prayer support of our church members.

But this is what bothers me—we pray for the sick by name, but how many times do we pray for the lost by name? Interestingly enough we pray more to keep people out of heaven than we pray to get people into heaven!