Selah Nights | Josh Blevins

In this message Pastor Josh Blevins makes a case from Paul's letters that praying for your pastor is not flattery toward a man but partnership in a mission — noting that Paul both prayed constantly for every church he wrote to and asked those same churches to pray for him seven times across seven letters, because he understood that wherever God's truth is proclaimed, an enemy is not far behind. Working through five prayer categories — protection, productivity, purity, partnership, and everything else — Pastor Josh draws on sobering statistics about pastoral burnout and disqualification, the story of an Indian pastor with 200 people praying through the night before every Sunday, and Spurgeon's boiler room of 400 intercessors, to make the point that the pulpit is not powered by personality but undergirded by prayer. The message closes with a direct and honest word: pastors love what they do and aren't complaining, but the parts of pastoral ministry the congregation never sees — the 3am hospital calls, the sleepless nights over someone's pain, the spiritual warfare that comes with standing in a pulpit — are exactly the parts that most need to be covered in prayer.