An infinite God can concern himself with matters great and comparatively insignificant. There are no time constraints when you dwell in eternity and no detail, no matter how microscopic, is ever overlooked. The Lord Jesus taught that the Father sees the falling of a sparrow and numbers the hairs on the human head. That’s the kind of God we have. He misses nothing, big or small.
Infinite bandwidth will do that, with no degradation of appropriate priorities.
Priorities, Priorities
Take cattle, for example. The apostle Paul taught that those who serve the Lord by ministering to his people have a right to benefit from their work. To prove it, he cites a provision of the Law of Moses that forbade Israel from muzzling its oxen when put to work. He adds, “Is it for oxen that God is concerned?”
Actually, he is. Paul was using hyperbole to emphasize the relative importance of being grateful for faithful ministry, not dismissing our bovine friends as unworthy of a moment’s thought. When God sent Jonah to Nineveh to preach repentance, he did it not just for the benefit of the Assyrians who might perish under his judgment, but for the benefit of the cattle that would die alongside their owners. The Lord plainly says this. So then, the oxen earn their heads of grain. Let them eat. We owe the servants of Christ considerably more, assuming we are paying attention. All things in proportion.
We may affirm that on the Lord’s list of priorities, top to bottom, the sparrows and oxen are way down there. “You are of more value than many sparrows,” Jesus said to his disciples, probably understating the case with a bit of appropriate humor. Nevertheless, sparrows still have their place in the Father’s great heart, and nobody who thinks like the Lord muzzles a hungry ox.
Infinite bandwidth makes appropriate provision for both.
Time and Prayer
Need I state the obvious? You and I do not have infinite bandwidth. We are creatures of time and space. If most Christians who have yet to retire pray for more than half an hour a day on average, I’d be surprised. More importantly still, if we pray together as a local church more for more than forty minutes a week, I’d be even more surprised. Prayer meetings are generally an hour in length. A hymn, a little scripture exposition and itemizing prayer requests eat up close to half that. In most churches and on many weeks, corporate prayer time is thirty minutes or less.
Accordingly, we ought to esteem those minutes we spend in corporate prayer each week more precious than the half hour a day (or whatever it may be in your case) that we each spend on personal prayer. They are an order of magnitude fewer. That which is rare is of greater value, or at least merits better management. The more limited our bandwidth, the more attentive stewardship those minutes require.
Better Asked Elsewhere
There used to be prayer chains. Today, most churches have one or more administrators circulating emails to update the local believers on the health and urgent needs — spiritual and physical — of other members of the congregation and the various relatives and friends we want to bring before the Lord. These are individual concerns, and we can pray about them individually during the time we are apart, especially when more than a few of the people we are praying for are entirely unknown to us. Singling out unsaved friends and relatives in a public setting may even be counterproductive, especially if they live close by, unless they have specifically asked for prayer. They may feel their family or friends are talking about them at church behind their backs. Some confidence is prudent.
I find it more useful to ask a few close friends from church to include such requests in their own private prayers so we can “agree on earth together”, rather than bring them before the larger congregation, where there may be degrees of maturity and wisdom represented.
Agreement is Important
Agreement is important, especially in congregational prayer. Speaking of that, I will confess I have great difficulty agreeing with certain prayers, especially where they concern older believers. Let me share one example. Our time on earth is limited, and getting old is rarely fun, especially when the body and mind no longer work the way they once did. As my father said to my brother in his last few months on this planet, “I’m grateful to the Lord for every day he’s given me, but I’m not asking him for any more.” Shortly thereafter, the Lord took him home.
Well-meaning Christians beseeching the Lord for my father’s healing and restoration during that period may thus have found themselves at odds in prayer with both his own wishes and the now-revealed will of God. Why lead a whole congregation down that road? Dad would probably have been more grateful for the occasional prayer that he might enjoy the Lord with every ounce of his diminishing faculties and finish the race well, but few were aware of that.
I suspect many faithful senior believers are as eager to see the Lord as Paul declared himself to be. They will be sorely missed when they leave us, but they do not need entire congregations saying “Amen” to prayers for medical miracles in which they have little or no emotional investment.
Redeeming the Time
Our Lord distinguishes between the value of an apostle and an ox, and between that of a disciple and a sparrow. He gets his priorities in order. Surely you and I ought to be able to distinguish between a prayer request that concerns the gathered local body of Christ and one more effectively taken to the Lord at home, in private, where our time before the Lord is constrained only by our level of personal commitment and not by decisions made for us by others.
A man who makes requests of the Lord in public is speaking on behalf of the entire congregation. In order to make the best use of that time, those who stand up to pray in a weekly prayer gathering serve us best when they occupy themselves with matters about which the congregation as a whole can unequivocally agree.
Some examples: Corporate testimony. The weekly public ministry where we gather. The spiritual, material, mental and emotional needs of the servants of Christ on whom we have corporately laid hands. The quality and Christ-centeredness of congregational worship. The sweetness and authenticity of our fellowship in Christ. The need for wisdom in our leadership. The development of local gift. The edification of the local believers. The next generation of godly elders. The spiritual effectiveness of the programs we put on as a group. The blessed hope of our Lord’s soon return.
Every member of every congregation can say “Amen” to such requests with no reservation and with full knowledge and information.
Duplication and Crowding Out
That is not to minimize the significance of individual time-sensitive needs and concerns, especially to the individuals most directly involved. Christians get married, have babies, get sick, lose jobs or can’t find them, struggle financially, lose family members, and have friends, co-workers and neighbors they love and want to see won to Christ. The Lord cares about those things as deeply as we do and much more so. But I’m not sure we need to duplicate all those individual requests every midweek when we come together for corporate prayer. When we do, we risk crowding out the ongoing spiritual agenda we all have in common, and in common with Christ himself.
But unlike the Lord, we do not have infinite bandwidth.
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