"Pray My Strength in the Lord"

“Pray My Strength in the Lord”

“Pray my strength in the Lord.”  Those immortal words usually ended the average testimony that I heard while growing up.  In fact, I finished a personal testimony or two with them.  I have come to appreciate the very humble, earnest and powerful prayer embedded in what I once thought was the rote and customary ending to spiritual public speaking.  Actually, those words remind me of the Mizpah of Genesis 31:49.  Jacob and Laban bless each other with the prayer, “May the Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent one from another,” as they depart and go their separate ways.  Similarly, “Pray my strength in the Lord” is a heartfelt request that the gathered community of faith will uphold the petitioner and each member of the family in prayer while we are apart during the week.

Moreover, these six words are an honest request for support in prayer so that that petitioner can live the Christian faith with integrity.  The supplicant asks his fellow brothers and sisters to faithfully request the Holy Spirit empowers him with willingness and diligence to lead a congruent life of Christian principles and daily choices.  Because a believer cannot achieve integrity solely on the basis of willpower, he needs faithful support from the family of faith in their constant prayers for him.

The apostle Paul vividly depicts the dilemma of the average believer in Romans 7:18-20.  “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.  For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil that I do not want to do - this I keep on doing.  Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”  (NIV)

Despite the earnest attempt of every believer to forsake the sinful nature, he periodically perhaps even daily lapses into the “old ways” of being.  Character defects, if not neutralized or eliminated, eventually emerge.  Yet, new life in Christ yields the wholehearted desire to live to the honor and glory of the Lord Jesus Christ and in service to humankind.  Accordingly, he faces the daily challenge of aligning his new profession of faith and his practical actions.  He requires the inner fortitude to overcome his compelling physical instincts and emotional preferences in which he indulges self-centered desires.

Therefore, he rightly joins a “healthy, well-balanced” community of faith where he can grow spiritually and develop personally.  He stands at the appropriate time and asks his brothers and sisters in the Lord to pray for him.  He wants them to intercede on his behalf.  He desires that they pray for his success in the Christian journey.  He hopes that they will pray that he will grow stronger in the Lord each day.  As he engages “life on life’s terms,” he wants peace and assurance in knowing that the prayers of his family of faith support him.  He offers this simple yet significant request in the humble words, “Pray my strength in the Lord.”