Broken with a Promise
I. Why Would God Break Us?
IT is here that Paul picks up again the sentence which he began in verse 1 and from which he was deflected. He begins with the words: It is for this cause. What is the cause which makes him pray? We are back again at the basic idea of the letter. Paul has painted his great picture of the Church. This world is a disintegrated chaos; there is division everywhere, between nation and nation, between individuals, and within a person’s inner life. It is God’s design that all the discordant elements should be brought into one in Jesus Christ.
We must note the word used for Paul’s attitude in prayer. ‘I bow my knees’, he says, ‘in prayer to God.’ That means even more than that he kneels; it means that he prostrates himself. The ordinary Jewish attitude of prayer was standing, with the hands stretched out and the palms upwards. Paul’s prayer for the Church is so intense that he casts himself face down before God in an agony of passionate request