Prayers to the End

We live in a fast-paced world where unless you are constantly moving, it feels like you are falling behind. This world has trained us to think this way even about our Christian lives. “Fast-paced” isn’t typically what should come to our mind when we think about prayer. Prayer feels slow, dare we say it, unproductive. But it is prayer that Paul emphasizes so much here at the end of this letter. 

As Paul makes the final turn in his letter to the Epehesians, he suddenly drops the military imagery and instead exhorts the Ephesians church (and us) on the importance of prayer. He spends quite a bit of time on this here, highlighting its importance to the spiritual fight. He also breaks out the word “all” four times in this brief section before finally requesting that this gift of prayer be applied to him and his calling. 

Prayer should be a continual, Bible directed, others-focused way of life

Let’s begin by talking about Paul’s exhortation to be praying “at all times.” This is our first “all” that Paul applies to our prayer life. It should be done at all times. Now obviously, Paul isn’t calling us to have heads bowed, eyes closed, knees bent, deep in prayer 24 hours a day. But what he is calling us to is a heart that is always on a hair-trigger to pray. I came across one guy who put it this way, “I’ve never prayed for more than twenty minutes, but I have never gone twenty minutes without praying.” I think that is what Paul is getting at here. Prayer is just the natural part of your day where you are constantly interacting with God. It should be something that we are familiar with, it is how we treat our phones, isn’t it? We do this with our phones all the time. Whenever we see something interesting, what do we do? We whip out our phones to capture it. Whenever we see nothing interesting, what do we do? We whip out our phones to distract us from being bored. When we are sad and need a numbing, we take it out, when we are celebrating the end of a day, we whip it out, when we wake up, it is often the first thing we see and often the last thing we put it down before we go to sleep. This isn’t an anti-phone statement, but it does illustrate our capacity to do this. We can be connected to something every twenty minutes, even if it isn’t for a very long time. All those pick-ups add up. Even if you change your background on your phone to “Pray” that could help!

If we were to pray every twenty minutes (3 times an hour) for just two minutes at a time, over the course of a day (assuming 15 hours of consciousness), that would be over an hour and a half of prayer every day! Spending just one minute in prayer over that length of time, would be 45 minutes of prayer a day. Now, imagine how many different life situations you would bring into prayer? How might your prayer improve in terms of variety? If you were to talk to God about the things that have happened over the last 20 minutes, you would have a much greater variety of things that you would bring to God in your life. 

So it is pretty clear when we are supposed to pray, but how are we supposed to pray? Specifically, what does Paul mean when he talks about prayer “in the Spirit”? Some have thought that praying in the Spirit has meant praying in some sort of unknown, spiritual language that even the prayer doesn’t really know. That isn’t what Paul is talking about here, I don’t think. Contrary to popular conceptions of Him, the Holy Spirit isn’t actually known for being unclear. He is quite clear; He’s the One who wrote the Bible. He has no trouble getting His message across; just look at the book of Acts. What I think Paul is referring to here is something that he wrote back in Romans 8:26-27. If you don’t know what to pray for or how to pray for something, pray that. The Holy Spirit will fix the prayers to what they should have been. 

But there is another way that the Holy Spirit guides your prayers: through the Bible. If you want to know what your prayers should be, become familiar with the Book the Holy Spirit wrote. Study the Psalms as the example of prayers for nearly any situation in life. It’s not just the Psalms either. By studying Paul’s letters you can learn what the Christian life should be like and fit everything through that grid. For example, it is perfectly fine to pray for someone’s health (James 5:14), but there is so much more that we could be praying for them. Have you prayed through the fruit of the Spirit and asked the Lord to cultivate those in yourself and in others as well? Do we pray for people’s spiritual health as much as or at least as well as their physical health? That’s what the Holy Spirit prays for us as it says in Romans 8:27 “And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” What is the will of God? 1 Thess 4:3 “your sanctification.” Again, do we pray that people would be healed? Yes, but there is much more that we can also pray for, and that is what praying in the Spirit will bring us. He guides us in His Word how to pray, and then fixes our broken prayers when we get them wrong. 
Paul encourages us to pray this way in all of our prayers and petitions to God (two ways of saying the same thing, basically). All of our prayers should be directed by the Holy Spirit, especially those that we offer up for others. 

As we get to the latter half of verse 18, we are told to keep alert. The word Paul uses for “alert” means “lie awake, pass sleepless nights.” (Thielman, 434). This is such a powerful image. For those of you who have had to deal with insomnia, when are you ever more alert than that? For whatever reason you are awake, you are intensely aware of yourself and your situation. That’s part of what is so maddening about it! But when it comes to prayer, it is this level of alertness, readiness to pray, especially for others, is what Paul wants us to develop. What does that look like? I think this is getting at a first instinct to an issue is to pray about it. John Piper has an illustration I’ve thought about a lot over the years. He mentions that we often think about prayer as being more like a domestic intercom trying to reach the front desk for more pillows rather than a war radio asking for supplies. When we treat prayer more like the domestic intercom, when a real situation hits us, we don’t reach for it. If we thought about it more like it actually is, a line of communication for a battle, our first instinct is to reach out to the Commander when something shows up on the battlefield.  

Paul mentions more about prayer, specifically that we are to persevere in our prayers. This may actually be the hardest part of Paul’s instruction on prayer. We are to keep praying, calling into Command, even when we don’t get the answer right away. Anyone who has been in the Christian life for any length of time has experienced this. You find yourself smacking the side of the radio, as it were, asking God, “Is this thing on?” Maybe you have been praying for a good thing like a spouse or a child, or the growth of the church, or a revival of the gospel and it just continues to be radio silence, or so it seems. It is hard enough when you are praying for something for weeks and months, but it is an entirely different thing when you have been praying for something for decades. One of the commentaries that I read in preparation for this talked about how he prayed for his brother’s salvation for thirty years. Thankfully, that had a happy ending, but I can only imagine what that was like. Perhaps he was encouraged by these words by George Muller: “When asked if he really believed that two men for whose salvation he had prayed for over fifty years would be converted, George Müller of Bristol replied, “Do you think God would have kept me praying all these years if He did not intend to save them?” Both men were converted, one shortly before, the other after Müller’s death. (Kent Hughes).” Obviously, it isn’t a promise from God that whatever you pray for (even good things) will be granted (otherwise there would be a lot more lottery winners), but I think that there is something to Muller’s words that I have seen a number of times even in my own life. 

I remember when I was a teenager, there was an adult video store featured prominently on the road on the way to our church at the time. Every time we passed it for three or so years, we prayed that such a place would go out of business. Of all the things to pray for, that was something that the Lord laid on our hearts. After three years, a hurricane came through and damaged it so badly it had to be torn down and never was rebuilt. Now things haven’t always worked that way for me, either. Right out of seminary, I was praying for a specific job that I was pretty deep into the interview process with that didn’t work out. But that put me on a different path that has led right to this moment right here. Someday I’ll have to tell the whole story, but suffice it to say that God brought us through a lot of unexpected things that were perfect for the time (even if we didn’t see it that way). 

All this to say, we must never divorce persistence in prayer from the goodness of God. If He is going to, from my perspective, deny me a good thing, it is because ultimately it is for my good and that if I had all the information He had, I would agree 100%. I can’t remember where I saw this, but someone gave the illustration of a parent and child. The parent has found out that there is a recall on their child’s favorite toy due to a dangerous chemical within it. The parent has to, out of love, take away the toy. The child doesn’t understand, and there is really no way to make a young child understand that. It is the same with God and us. We can ask for something that God doesn’t give to us. We don’t understand why, and perhaps in our humanity on this side of heaven, we couldn’t understand it if it were explained to us. But we must be reminded that while we continue to pray for that thing, we worship God by saying, “I know you are good. I know that you have placed this desire in my heart. I’ve searched your Word and know this is something you want me to pray for, so I am going to keep going.” That is a testimony that glorifies God. 

That is prayer that remembers that Christ has died for them. Jesus isn’t being a meanie, withholding something you want as a power trip like we might do. Jesus has already given you Himself. When you were a sinner, Jesus died for you anyway and rose again from the dead. He invites you to follow Him, yes down a narrow, hard road into the shadow of valley of death, but also promises to lead you to His house to dwell forever. That’s where that shield of faith and helmet of salvation come in. You aren’t praying for a losing battle. You are marching to Zion. 

Prayer should be offered for the gospel to go forward.
As we come to the end of the letter Paul shares a prayer request. It is worth noting here that Paul, the Apostle, needs and asks for prayer. We should not feel that we are above the Apostle Paul in that way. So when Paul, writing from prison, asks for prayer, what does pray for? That he would boldly preach the gospel. He has done this already, which is why he is in chains right now! Paul’s main focus in life is that the gospel would go forward boldly as he knows that he has been called to speak it. 

That should be our focus as well. Do you pray for yourself as you begin the day, “Let me speak the gospel boldly today?” Are you perhaps a little afraid to? Well, then, all the more reason to pray it! We pray for revival, yes, but we need to pray that we will be a part of that! 

So what is our takeaway from this passage? Prayer is so important to Paul that we break from our military metaphor emphasize. This is something that we offer up constantly because we are in a battle for the souls of people. Paul needed prayer, Jesus Himself needed prayer, you need prayer. It can be something as simple as a minute every twenty minutes or a scheduled time to pray. Now you may say, “You have no idea how hectic my life is!” You’re right I don’t, but I can quote from my wife, whom I have on very good authority is a very busy person. One morning, I offered for myself to watch the kids who were unusually demanding that morning, so that Abby could go into her room and do her devotions in the peace and quiet. She looked at me and said, “If I don’t learn how to spend time with Jesus in the midst of chaos, then I’ll never spend time with God.” She’s right! Your life is hectic! But you must figure out how to make it work. 

“We close with these fitting words from Dr. John Piper’s book Desiring God: Unless I’m badly mistaken, one of the main reasons so many of God’s children don’t have a significant life of prayer is not so much that we don’t want to, but that we don’t plan to. If you want to take a four-week vacation, you don’t just get up one summer morning and say, “Hey, let’s go today!” You won’t have anything ready. You won’t know where to go. Nothing has been planned. But that is how many of us treat prayer. We get up day after day and realize that significant times of prayer should be part of our life, but nothing’s ever ready. We don’t know where to go. Nothing has been planned. No time. No place. No procedure. And we all know that the opposite of planning is not a wonderful flow of deep, spontaneous experiences in prayer. The opposite of planning is the rut. If you don’t plan a vacation you will probably stay home and watch TV! The natural unplanned flow of spiritual life sinks to the lowest ebb of vitality. There is a race to be run and a fight to be fought. If you want renewal in your life of prayer you must plan to see it. Therefore, my simple exhortation is this: Let us take time this very day to rethink our priorities and how prayer fits in. Make some new resolve. Try some new venture with God. Set a time. Set a place. Choose a portion of Scripture to guide you. Don’t be tyrannized by the press of busy days. We all need mid-course corrections. Make this a day of turning to prayer — for the glory of God and for the fullness of your joy.” (Hughes). 

Image by Himsan ​