2 Thessalonians 3:1-5 ~ How to Pray for Missionaries

It is very important that we pray for the missionaries we support. The missionaries a church supports must be able to depend on prayer from the church. When home on furlough, many missionaries give out commitment cards and people can commit to pray or to give (or both). Of the two, prayer is a greater commitment of time and effort than a pledge of money (Shogren, p. 319).

Andrew Murray: “The man who mobilizes the Christian church to pray will make the greatest contribution to world evangelization in history.”

Charles Spurgeon: “I would rather teach one man to pray than ten men to preach.”

As concerns prayer and evangelism, most of the prayers found in the New Testament are for the effectiveness of the missionaries rather than the salvation of the lost. For example:

ESV Matthew 9:37-18 Then he [Jesus] said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest."

The Bible also gives examples of how missionaries should pray for churches. Today’s passage deals with both.