Pray for the messenger. Paul regularly made that appeal to churches because of the high-value message he and his team carried.
The message of Christ is powerful, and is crucial to the unfolding of his plans for lives. It’s a threat to Satan’s hold on hearts and communities, so it’s not surprising that the Adversary tries to weaken the message…. by compromising the messenger1.
Paul understood that. His ‘pray for the messenger’ appeals were less about personal safety and more about being an effective carrier of the Christ-message (2 Thes 3:1-2, Col 4:3-4, Eph 6:19-20).
Satan’s flip file on how to weaken the messenger holds several strategies. One of them involves elevating the messenger. To spotlight the messenger in a way that leaves the message in the shadows.
Elevation of the messenger isn’t always wrong. Sometimes, promotion gives an effective platform for broadcasting the message. However, when it draws more attention to the messenger than to the message, the tactic of weakening Christ’s message has succeeded.
To give Christ highest visibility, his messengers must embrace life in his shadow (John 3:30).
The early church record gives an example of Christ’s messengers refusing to be elevated, as doing so would harm their message.
In Lystra, as an exclamation mark to his message, Paul healed a lame man. When the crowd saw the man, lame from birth, jump up and walk, they saw it as a sign from the gods of their belief system: The gods have come down among us in human form. They exalted Paul and Barnabas as deity, and made preparations to offer sacrifices to them (Acts 14:7-20).
What a platform! The apostles could capitalise on their new fame as gods and declare their message to a captive audience. But accepting the crowd’s veneration would weaken Christ’s message. Instead, the apostles tore their clothes in anguish, remonstrated with the crowd, and Paul came close to martyrdom for the sake of preserving the message he carried.
We see a present-day Lystra phenomenon in the megastar persona adopted by some ministries/messengers of Christ, or in the celebrity status thrust on them by followers, or in less overt forms of messenger elevation.
It begins small. As the personality and accomplishments of the messenger grab more of the spotlight, the clarity and power of the radical message of Christ is left in the shadows.
It’s right to grieve at signs of harmful messenger elevation. But we can do more; we can derail the Enemy’s strategy. Every true messenger of Christ is a target of relentless opposition from the Enemy, whose aim is to weaken the message. We can resist that by doing the very thing Paul called for: pray for the messenger.
- Read the following pray for the messenger passages: 2 Thes 3:1-2, Col 4:3-4, Eph 6:19-20. Note Paul’s prayer points.
- Schedule pray for the messenger time. Choose a local message-bearer of Christ (for instance, a local pastor, Bible teacher, or someone else with a platform ministry). Place Paul’s request alongside their name: Pray for us (even if they haven’t specifically asked you to pray for them). Use the points in the above passages to guide your praying.
- Name one person who has a wider, trans-local ministry of communicating Christ’s message (for instance, a missionary, an evangelist, a Bible teacher or a pastor with a ministry that extends beyond a local congregation). Use the points above to guide your praying.
- Plan for regular pray for the messenger sessions
1 How ‘messenger’ is used in this post: All of Christ’s followers are called to live as his witnesses. But he gifts some with a ministry of publicly unpacking his message. These messengers of the “mystery of the gospel” (Eph 6:19), or the “mystery of Christ” (Col 4:3) are not necessarily all evangelists. They include those who serve as local pastors, or in the trans-local ministries mentioned in Eph 4:11-12. But their sense of call and shared passion is to herald the message of Christ so that it spreads rapidly, is believed, and shapes lives.
