And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people. Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.
Ephesians 6:18-20 NIVUK
When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time with teenagers who were in street gangs. I saw many different types of weapons: flick knives, kitchen knives, truncheons, clubs, hammers, knuckledusters, screwdrivers, chains, nunchucks... everything except the one weapon most of America seems to be in love with: the gun.
However, I came to two conclusions about those who carry weapons of any variety.
Firstly, those who carry them do so out of fear because they do not feel safe. Which is ironic. Because, to my mind, hanging about with a bunch of people drinking caffeine-fortified wine and high as kites on drugs, who are also carrying potentially lethal weapons, is about as dangerous and volatile a situation as it gets.
To me, the solution is not to tool yourself up. To me, the solution is to stop hanging around with people like that.
Secondly, those who had weapons were not safe.
Why?
Simple. The very fact that they had those weapons made them a target. It identified them as being in a gang. It provoked an arms race with rival gangs. And thus a deadly game of poker developed over who could trump the other with the weapons they were carrying.
Someone was bound to be injured or even killed. And they were. More than once.
The same pattern is being repeated all across our major cities with depressing regularity.
No-one has learned a thing.
Do you know that Christians have another deadly weapon in their arsenal? One that is chronically under-valued and under-used?
Prayer.
Prayer is a weapon.
And a decidedly powerful one at that.
Mary, Queen of Scots once said of the famous Christian John Knox, ‘I fear the prayers of John Knox more than all the assembled armies of Europe.’
But it wasn’t just the prayers of John Knox she should fear.
James 5:16 tells us that the prayers of a righteous person are powerful and effective.
Jesus Himself tells us that prayers in faith can move mountains (Matthew 17:20).
Revelation tells us that the whole of Heaven falls silent to hear our prayers (Revelation 8:1-5).
Don’t ever, ever underestimate prayer. And don’t use it as the last resort, the option you use when you have nothing else left. No, go to it first of all.
But what should we pray for?
It’s interesting that having spent time explaining six weapons with a mostly personal focus, Paul now turns the focus outward. And to do it, he uses something most of us would believe is intimate and personal.
Yet that is wrong.
Prayer is not just personal. Yes, Jesus told us to pray alone in our rooms (Matthew 6:5-6). However, He had good reasons for doing so. Praying alone is good for us. It puts the focus on our relationship between us and God. It prevents our relationship being only about external behaviour – playing to the crowd – and makes it real.
But it’s also obvious from the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) that prayer is communal. Otherwise Jesus would have used first person pronouns (‘I’, ‘me’) instead of third person pronouns (‘us’, ‘we’).
The Lord’s Prayer is a communal prayer prayed alone.
And again, in Ephesians, Paul is emphasising the communal nature of prayer.
You see, Christian prayer is utterly unique. Hindu and Buddhist meditation is focused on me achieving nirvana for myself. Yoga is focused on my fitness. Breathing exercises are concentrated on me bringing my body under control. Islamic prayer is focused on me achieving salvation for myself.
But true Christian prayer surpasses them all. Yes, there are individual elements to it. Yes, its primary focus is on my relationship with God. But it doesn’t stay there. It radiates out through concern for other people close to me, and all the way out to compassion and concern for the world.
If it doesn’t – if we are purely focused on our own concerns – then our prayers are not Christ-like. Even a passive reading of John 17 would tell you that.
What is remarkable about Paul’s request here, though, is how it seems to radiate from the general to the specific.
Look at how it works.
Firstly we see a general command to pray. Which, for a Christian, should very like someone telling us to breathe regularly.
But what could Paul mean by telling us to pray ‘in the Spirit’?
The Greek preposition translated as ‘in’ can also mean ‘with’ or ‘through’. This makes sense when we see what Paul taught the Roman Church about prayer and the Holy Spirit:
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
Romans 8:26-27 NIVUK
In other words, this is not a command to pray in some heavenly tongue that is incomprehensible on earth. Why would Paul do that when he acknowledged that not everyone has that gift (1 Corinthians 12:30)? Neither is it, as some of our more charismatic brethren might practice, a command to make an exhibition of prayer by making grunts and groans and all manner of other inhuman noises. Our prayer meetings should be prayer meetings, not a gathering of farmyard impressionists.
No, this is a command to pray with the Holy Spirit, to be led by the Holy Spirit and guided by the Holy Spirit in what we should pray for.
And we are to offer all kinds of prayers (see Philippians 4:6) on all kinds of occasions. Or, as Paul put it elsewhere:
pray continually,
1 Thessalonians 5:17 NIVUK
As we saw earlier, this includes prayer for the authorities over us – be they hostile or benign (1 Timothy 2:1-4).
But then Paul drills down to more specific prayer. He tells the Ephesians to be alert, or vigilant, and to pray for all the Lord’s people.
This is a global prayer – to be alert and vigilant to threats the church faces across the world and to pray for them.
This is one area where we can be neither complacent nor plead ignorance. There is an abundance of information available about the global church and the threats it faces. There are numerous good organisations that provide this information, such as Release International, Open Doors and many, many others. It’s far easier now to find out what’s happening than at any other time in history.
But then he asks them to pray for someone specific in a way that I find both challenging and encouraging at the same time.
Himself.
Yes, that’s right: the great Paul the Apostle is asking a church he helped plant to pray for him.
I find that encouraging because even a great man like Paul realises that he can’t go it alone – he needs the prayers of his fellow believers.
I find it challenging because here is a man in chains, facing the death sentence, writing to a beleaguered, persecuted church, and his priority, above all else, is that he might declare the Gospel fearlessly.
Not tactlessly. As Peter teaches in his letter, our declaration of the Gospel should be with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15-16). But fearlessly.
So here we see all kinds of prayers, specific prayers for the (local and global) church, and then specific prayers for those within the church whose job it is to declare the Word of God publicly.
That is how the prayer weapon should be used.
A few weeks ago at time of writing, a traveller in Ben Gurion Airport in Israel caused a huge fuss. He arrived at the check-in desk, checked in and then showed the contents of his hand luggage to the check-in clerk before asking, ‘Can I take this on the plane?’
The check-in clerk panicked. He had a live grenade in his bag. He was hoping to take it home as a souvenir.
The terminal had to be cleared. The local bomb disposal unit had to be called. It was quite a situation.
Christian, you and I have access to a massive, unstoppable weapon – a weapon more powerful than anything banned by the UN.
So we must use it. And use it wisely.
Questions
1. Had you ever thought of prayer as a weapon? Why / why not?
2. Have you ever noticed the external focus in Christian prayer? What proportion of your prayer time is spent praying for yourself and which proportion for other people?
3. When was the last time you prayed for the global church or for those who have the responsibility to publicly declare the Word of God?
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