Do you pray often? If so, do you pray for other believers? And when you pray for other believers, how do you pray for them? Hopefully you are better at it than I used to be.
I used to primarily pray for the safety of my family and friends. “Lord, keep them safe as they go today” or “Lord, bring them back safely”. These are good prayers and when prayed genuinely, God hears them.
Sometimes I would also pray for traveling mercies for those who were going on a trip. This is closely related to the prayer for safety but also includes (I believe) a prayer for ease of passage and a peaceful journey. This is also a good prayer.
Every once in a while I would see someone hurting, sad or depressed and I would pray that God would comfort them and ease their sorrow. God comforts His children and we are blessed when we pray for others in this way. Once again, this is a good prayer.
These three types of prayers made up the great majority of my prayers for others for many years. I was genuine and prayed from the heart and I believe God heard and answered them.
And then something happened that rocked me to my core and completely changed the way that I prayed for others.
There was a man that I greatly respected. He held a position of authority in his church and was a pillar in his community. I had enjoyed his hospitality on occasion, I liked being around him and outwardly he had everything going for him. When he was arrested for breaking the law by falling to sexual temptation it was like someone had knocked the very breath out of me.
As I began to pray and read God’s word for comfort I came across the book of Colossians. Right away the Spirit began to speak and to convict me through Paul’s words.
“We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you” (Colossians 1:3 NKJV) is how Paul begins. Thankfulness is so important in the life of the believer and we are never more open to God’s instruction than when we come into His presence with a thankful heart. Paul knew this and his letters are filled with thankfulness, just as our lives should be. Notice at the end how Paul says he is praying always for his friends in Colossae.
9 “For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; 10 that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God;11 strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, for all patience and longsuffering with joy;12 giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light.”
In four little verses Paul shares great wisdom with us. Paul gives us the recipe for how to pray for our brothers and sisters in Christ. These four verses are what so convicted me and I realized that I had not been praying as I should. I don’t think I had ever prayed a prayer like that one in my entire life!
While I had not encouraged this man in his sin I also had not been doing my duty to pray for him as a leader in the community and in the church and more importantly, as a brother in Christ. I was not lifting my brother up as I should and I share in his failure and his sorrow.
Brothers and sisters, we need each other. We need to encourage one another, we need to teach and admonish one another and most of all, we need to pray for one another. We need to take Paul’s prayer for the church at Colossae and make it our own. Can you imagine the net effect this would have on the body of believers if we all committed to praying for each other in this way?
In tomorrow’s post we will go deeper into those three verses in Colossians and examine them closely. What elements, exactly, make Paul’s prayer so very powerful and so very effective? And how can we take those same elements and apply them to our prayers today?
For now, I ask that you think about the way that you pray and especially the way that you pray for others believers. God can use your prayers to meet needs and to perform powerful acts of righteousness here on earth, but only if we are praying for the right things and in the right way.
[…] Yesterday I shared a story from my past that made me take a hard look at how I had been praying. The Lord led me to the book of Colossians and there I read what Paul wrote to those believers and how he included them in his prayers. What I read there convicted and humbled me and I realized that I needed to be praying in exactly the same way. Let’s look at those verses from Colossians Chapter 1. […]