Welcome back to the As Pastor John Podcast and today Pastor John I want to talk to you about your recent funeral prayer that you recently delivered on behalf of the pals family, family of five, planning and preparing to become missionaries to Japan who were tragically killed in an automobile accident this summer.

You were asked to pray at the funeral and that public lament which we published in this podcast has now exceeded 700,000 plays to date.

Which is at least three times more plays than any of the other 900 plus episodes we've published in this podcast. It's been amazingly well received and I think even in the light of the tragedy that called for it, it would be beneficial to pastors and leaders to all of us to hear from you on how you made it.

So can you take us into it? What is it? What did you attend to accomplish and how did you write it? Tony, the first thing I think we need to be completely honest about is my misgivings about whether prayers should even be broadcast on the internet and whether you and I right now should be talking about this.

Of course, the very fact that I am talking about it and didn't pull the plug on this and that that we did make the prayer available at Desiring God and that I used Twitter to link to the whole service over at Bethlehem Hope and God website shows that my conclusion from those misgivings was that more good would be done by sharing it than by not.

But there are at least two reasons that give me pause and I think they would be helpful to mention here. One is that Jesus said hypocrites love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners that they may be seen by others.

That's a really important thing for me, the prayer to hear. The other is that we're dealing here with real families and real relationships and real pain and real loss. It's very fresh even now.

And the thought of somehow for us, you and me and Desiring God, the thought that we would exploit that moment and that pain to put ourselves forward would be absolutely load some in the eyes of God.

So God abominates that kind of spiritual prostitution. So as I stand before God in prayer, I have to look him in the eye as it were and let him search my heart as to whether the very praying of a prayer that alone the publishing of a prayer were more about me.

Then about him and those who suffer and the reason mentioning this struggle is part of the answer to your question of where the prayer came from is that every pastor has to ask this question when he prays in public, which ought to be pretty much every week.

The Bible endorses and encourages public praying for Corinthians 14, 16. We want people to hear and say, Amen to what we pray. That's what that verse says. Christian leaders are to lead their people in prayer publicly out loud, not just in a closet.

And everyone who prays in public, whether in a group of six or 600 or 6,000 must face the question of selfish motivation. It's not unique to me or to Desiring God or to a funeral.

It's every time anyone opens his mouth in the presence of two or three people that's an issue of hypocrisy on the line and authenticity on the line.

So the first thing to say about where this prayer came from is that it came from a sense of utter inadequacy.

First, because the disproportion between the deaths of two parents and three children, the disproportion between those five deaths in one horrific conflagration on the one hand.

And the the the sufficiency of words words words words to embody or somehow represent the magnitude of what just happened that disproportion seemed to me utterly mammoth insurmountable.

There's no way that words could do justice to the reality of what had just happened that that was the first sense of inadequacy and it's true.

It's not just like I've got an inadequate feeling here. It's true words cannot cannot capture the breadth and depth of what these families were and are.

Even as we speak experiencing so what's the pastor to do what's a friend to do the second sense of inadequacy was that I knew I knew I would be standing before a thousand real live people this was the biggest service we've ever had in my 33 years plus in relation to Bethlehem.

I knew that I would be standing in front of a thousand people plus real live bodies and how does a fallen sinful pastor pray to God to God not to people to God really to God when he knows that a thousand people are listening to see what he says.

And again I know that the Bible says when we pray publicly we should care about what other people here are saying first Corinthians 14 16 we should care you pastor shouldn't say auto care who's listening I'm just praying to an audience of one baloney baloney we know people are listening and and the Bible says we must care less they cannot say amen the Bible gives explicit instruction to care

about whether or not the people who are listening get it so it's a supernatural work of God it's a miracle if a pastor can really speak to God that is authentically pray authentically intercede authentically lament and praise and plead rather than performing for human audience that's a miracle it's a work of the spirit.

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