The Pastor Confessing Sin in Prayer

 By Pastor Benjamin Glaser - Posted at Thoughts From Parson Farms:

How Ministers Are to Lead Towards Supplication in the Pulpit

Howdy!

As important as the Bible is to the public worship of Christ’s Church one of the more unique elements in a protestant service is the pastoral prayer. Sometimes I get poked at for the length of my pastoral prayers at Bethany. It’s interesting that in older times when there was less going on in the morning gathering the people of God actually worshiped for much longer than we do now.

Whether we are speaking about the sermon, the singing, or the reading of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, but especially the lifting up of petitions unto the Lord the congregation was expectant of much more content than we generally do today. Part of it is cultural, some of it is weakness spiritually, a lot of it is just changes in the world. Focusing too much on time can cause us to miss the purpose of what we are doing specifically in the pastoral prayer portion. For our walk through the Westminster Directory today, and for the next few weeks, we are going to be discussing the place and purpose of the various prayers we make in our own worship service, both morning and evening, and how we can use the directory’s instructions to improve our own attention span for spending these moments in the presence of our Lord and Master.

Here is the section for today:

AFTER reading of the word, (and singing of the psalm,) the minister who is to preach, is to endeavour to get his own and his hearers hearts to be rightly affected with their sins, that they, may all mourn in sense thereof before the Lord, and hunger and thirst after the grace of God in Jesus Christ, by proceeding to a more full confession of sin, with shame and holy confusion of face, and to call upon the Lord to this effect...

Continue here.