What to pray

Last week my wife stood up and read a chapter of a book that has touched her heart. I want to bring to you today a book that has touched my heart. It began after I thought about what my wife read and what she has done in the last two weeks and continued through some other thoughts and directions. The book is the letter to the Philippians. I want to begin right at the start, where Paul starts. With a greeting and a prayer.

Philippians 1:1–11 NASB95

Paul and Timothy, bond-servants of Christ Jesus, To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, including the overseers and deacons: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all, in view of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now. For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. For it is only right for me to feel this way about you all, because I have you in my heart, since both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers of grace with me. For God is my witness, how I long for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ; having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

As I thought about prayer, how we pray and what we pray for, about our prayer lists and what is on the prayer list and what is not, as I thought about answers to prayer and times when prayer seems to go unanswered I turned to the biblical examples of prayer. Since the bible contains more than 1000 references to prayer there was no shortage of information.

We find Jesus praying both for himself and for his disciples. When Jesus prayed he knew he was not telling God anything new, Jesus was not trying to persuade God to change his mind since God and Jesus are one and are of one mind. Jesus was not trying to get anything from God or give anything to God, Jesus is God. So why did Jesus pray, partly as an example for us but also it is a form of communication and Jesus and the father are one, when they were separated by Jesus’ earthly body I am sure they missed the fellowship, the oneness they had always had and praying was a way for them feel closer together, it is also a way for us to get closer to god and to feel closer to God.

Lots of old testament prayers, perhaps the most striking of which is a prayer of David when his child was dying. David prayed, begging God for the life of his son, he wept and he begged, refusing to eat or sleep until the child died. His servants were afraid to tell him, afraid of what he would do when he found out God did not say yes to David’s pleadings. When David discerned that the child had died he got up from the ground, washed, ate and went back to living his life. The pain was still there, the grief was still there but David accepted God’s answer, even though it was not the one he wanted and he went on with his life. What a picture of faith and trust was given to us through David’s prayer and his acceptance of God’s answer.

There is no doubt that David was wrong, that he deserved to be punished, there is no doubt that God’s decision was just and right, there is no doubt that David was crushed by the death of his son, it must have affected the rest of his life and never been far from his mind, you never get over something like that, he could have used that event as an excuse to pull away from God and to blame God for the evil of the world, but David did not. David accepted the grief and the loss and held fast to the promise that one day he would see his son again in heaven.

In the new testament perhaps the most frequent prayer was Paul. He told us to pray without ceasing and he opened his letters by telling the people he was writing to that he was praying for them. He mentioned some of the things he prayed for and often named the specific people he prayed for. I did notice something there that never occured to me before. Paul prayed about several different things and over multiple people and places and he always seemed to know what to pray for, even with people that were far away and that he had not seen in years.

In all of these examples what can we learn about prayer. Looking at the prayers of Jesus we can learn that prayer is not just an information exchange or a way to ask for things but a way to connect with God, to feel closer to God, a way for us to feel his presence and his reality. Prayer is a way to close the gap between heaven and earth and allow us to be in God’s presence spiritually even when we cannot see or find him physically. Maybe Paul’s admonition to pray without ceasing simply means that we are to keep God close and feel his presence in everything we do, be so connected with God that we feel him influencing our decisions and feel his presence wherever we go and whatever we do, to never let enough spiritual distance get between God and us that we feel like we can act independently of God but to always feel him near and always think and act like he was right there beside us.

From David we can learn that we can pray in the worst of circumstances. Even when it is all our fault and even when we have clearly let God down we can still pray. We can learn to trust God, even when he doesn’t respond the way we want him to. From the example of David’s prayer we can learn to lean on God during the hard times and let him be our rock and our fortress, we can also learn to love God and trust God even when we don’t understand or even when we don’t agree with God. Effective prayer does not require that we understand God or even like the answers he gives us, but it does require that we trust God and refuse to pull away from God when things get tough. Perhaps one of the most important lessons of prayer is to cling to God in the good times as the creator of all good things and to lean on God in the hard times as our rock and our fortress so that whether times are good or times are hard either way we grow closer to God.

From Paul I think we can learn how to pray for others. Paul was always praying for the churches he started and for the people he had met along the way. I could not find a single letter where Paul asked someone what he should pray for them for, in fact I could not find any evidence in scripture of one person asking another person if they had any prayer requests. I did find a lot of examples of one person praying for another person but it seemed that those prayers usually took place without the other person even knowing it. The closest I can find to prayer requests in the bible are to pray for the sick and let the elders lay hands on them, maybe that is why our prayer lists are filled with the sick and the hospitalized.

Paul informed people in his letters that he had been praying for them. He must have had the biggest prayer list of all time. As far as we know the people he prayed for had no idea they were being prayed for by him until they received notification in his letters, of course by then he had been praying for some time. Apparently it was Paul who chose what to pray for and who to pray for, guided by the holy spirit Paul used his discernment and his spiritual maturity to determine how to best spend his prayer time.

Paul even defended his right to pray for the Philippians

Philippians 1:4–8 NASB95

always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all, in view of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now. For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. For it is only right for me to feel this way about you all, because I have you in my heart, since both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers of grace with me. For God is my witness, how I long for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus.

He said he was happy to pray for them because they were participants in the Gospel with him, in other words they shared with Paul the most important thing in his life. He was confident that God was still working in their lives because he was continually talking to God about them, he was praying for them.

Paul claimed that it was right for him to feel this way because they were in his heart, that they were in his heart because they were partakers of the same grace he received and because they defended the gospel and shared his troubles. In other words he had common goals with them and common feelings, they had been through some of the same things and he knew how to pray for them because he knew them and because he had shared some of their trials and they had shared some of his.

He was invested in their lives and they were invested in his life so it was right that he should pray for them and that they should pray for him. I think we don’t find Paul asking how he could pray for them because he already knew. He knew their needs, their desires and their struggles because he had struggled with them, he was part of their lives. I think it is good that we pray for the sick, the bible commands it but I do not think that sickness or even death are the worst things we face in this world, the biggest struggles and the greatest triumphs are not physical but spiritual.

For a christian to die is a sad thing, but for a christian to lose hope is a tragedy. A person who gets cancer has a long road and a lot of struggles ahead of them but a person who hardens their heart is in for a much worse time. I have seen those who are terminally ill, people whose bodies hurt and who were literally wasting away become an inspiration to their friends and family. I have seen people in pain smile and laugh because the ones they loved were gathered around them and even in the midst of their pain they had joy. I have also seen people with perfectly healthy bodies become bitter and angry, hating the world and everyone in it. I have seen those with excellent health be completely miserable and alone and I would rather be dying and joyful than healthy and miserable.

I think we find it easy to ask for prayer for health issues because they are safe. No one will think less of you if you have a disease or an injury but what if your marriage is in trouble. You don’t want anyone to know that, what if you struggle with hate and bitterness, if everyone knew they might look down on you. We keep the worst problems to ourselves. We share our worst fears and our worst pain only with those we know that we can absolutely trust......and sometimes that means keeping them completely to ourselves.

Would you like to pray about the really important things. The things that no one knows about, the things that keep me up at night. Would you like to talk to God about the things that most concern your wife, your child, your best friend, about the things that most concern God. You will not learn about these things by checking a prayer list, you will not hear them by asking what you can pray for me about. To know these things, to be trusted with the things that really matter, to be let into my most protected thoughts and my most vulnerable areas you have to earn it, you have to work hard, you have to prove that you are trustworthy over and over.

Most of us have very few true friends, people we can trust, people who have proven that they care about us so much that they would never hurt us, people that love us. Most of the time we never tell others about our most secret selves. It is not something we would ever volunteer, you have to discern it, you have to be there when the times are tough, you have to spend the time and put in the hours. It is hard, it takes effort and it takes time to be a true friend that is closer than a brother. You have to watch and pay attention, you have to think and pray and put in the effort.

Paul prayed for these people because he had worked with them and suffered with them, he had prayed for them and cared for them. He knew them, he knew what they needed. Maybe he even knew it better than they did. It would make sense. He was perhaps the most spiritual mature and spiritually sensitive man of all time, he prayed without ceasing and he had suffered almost everything a man could suffer. So he knew how to pray and what to pray and he could feel their pain because he had been there and done that. Paul did have to ask someone what to pray for he prayed for about the things he knew, the people he knew, the lives he knew, the ones he loved.

You want to pray well, pray for those you love, the more you love them and get to know them the more you will know how to pray for them and the more you will want to pray for them. Of course first you have to love them, if you want to pray for someone........love them.

One more piece of advice, pray for everyone, one person at a time.