Let me begin this morning with a confession. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the message I am going to share with you this morning is at least as much for me as for any of you. I’m not really speaking to you this morning out of my own experience as much as I am preaching to myself about where I want and need to be in my own spiritual walk. In fact, I’m convinced that there are many of you here this morning that put this passage into practice in your lives much more effectively than I do.
With that in mind, let’s go ahead and read out loud our passage for this morning:
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 saints.
Ephesians 6:18 (NIV)
As always, we need to begin by putting this passage in its proper context. In verses 10-17, Paul has exhorted his readers to stand firm against the evil one and then he has described the six pieces of the armor of God that every believer has been given by God in order to be able to do so. And we’ve looked at each of those pieces of the armor in quite some detail in order to understand how to use them effectively against the schemes of the devil.
And, although in many of your Bibles, verse 18 is separated from the previous section by starting a new paragraph, there is no doubt that this verse is connected with the section on the armor of God. That is very clear in the Greek grammar, but there is another connection that is obvious even in our English translations. In verse 17, Paul ends his description of the armor with the “sword of the Spirit” and then here in verse 18, he instructs his readers to “pray in the Spirit”. We’ll look at that connection in some more detail in a few minutes.
Paul is not in any way indicating here that in addition to all the six pieces of armor we are to add prayer, as if it is the seventh piece of armor. But the point he is making is that prayer is woven all throughout the armor. When we arm ourselves with the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness and sandal our feet with the gospel of peace, when we take up the shield of faith and the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, we must at the same time also engage in prayer if we are going to be successful in battle.
It is quite instructive that as Paul comes to the end of his letter, his final thoughts deal with prayer. If you or I were to write a letter to someone else in order to try to convince them to take some action, we would make sure that our most significant arguments were at the end of that letter, because that would be what would be most likely to remain in the reader’s mind. And I think that is exactly what Paul is doing here.
Paul has described for his readers their exalted position in Jesus and the tremendous resources that they have in order to live their lives in accordance with who they are in Jesus. He has provided them with everything they need to be an effective follower of Jesus. In fact, I’m convinced that if somehow we lost all the rest of the Bible and all we had was the book of Ephesians, we would have enough to live the kind of life that God wants us to live.
But he closes his letter with this emphasis on prayer because there is a danger that we need to be aware of. Christians who have a knowledge of sound doctrine and at least some success with putting into practice the spiritual principles from God’s Word can easily come to the point where they figure they can live their lives in their own power and they lose their dependence on God. I think that is what Paul was warning about when he wrote to the church in Corinth:
So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!
1 Corinthians 10:12 (NIV)
So Paul ends his letter by calling his readers to prayer, because prayer is the antidote to the danger of depending on ourselves rather than depending on God.
In just one verse, just 24 words in the Greek, Paul provides us with one of the most complete teachings on prayer that we can find in the Scriptures. And as we look at this verse, the thing that immediately stands out is how this verse is centered on the word “all”. We’re going to focus on those four “all’s” as we look at this passage together this morning.
THE FOUR “ALL’S” OF PRAYER
1. The rate of prayer
And pray in the Spirit on all occasions…
We’re going to come back to the phrase “in the Spirit” at the end of our time this morning, but right now, let’s just focus on the phrase “on all occasions”. The word translated “occasion” is a word that means a period of opportunity. So Paul is instructing his readers to pray every single time that there is an opportunity for prayer.
If we go back to the Old Testament, we find that the Jews had set times for prayer. Probably one of the best known examples of that is Daniel praying three times a day. And since the early church consisted primarily of Jewish believers, we find that practice carrying through to that time. But, based on the words of Jesus, the frequency of prayer was no longer to be limited to specific times and places:
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.
Luke 18:1 (NIV)
Notice that Jesus taught His disciples that they should “always pray”. And that concept is picked up by Paul, not just here in Ephesians, but in a number of his other letters as well:
Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.
Romans 12:12 (NIV)
Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.
Colossians 4:2 (NIV)
pray continually
1 Thessalonians 5:17 (NIV)
I don’t know how many of you have the same question I do: How do I do that in real life? Obviously I can’t go around all the time with my eyes closed and my head bowed. And I certainly hope that if you’re on the road driving your car anywhere near me that you’re not doing that. How can I pray while I’m at work and I’m supposed to be doing something productive for my employer? How can I pray while I’m watching TV or a movie or doing my homework or reading or playing golf or…? Fortunately the Bible gives us some very practical advice on how to do that:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering.
Romans 12:1 (Message)
In other words, the way I am able to pray on all occasions is to live my life, every area of my life, being conscious of God. I put my whole life before Him and allow Him to speak to me about my life anywhere and anytime. It is an attitude and an awareness more than it is a physical act.
2. The range of prayer
…with all kinds of prayers and requests.
As Paul often does, he uses two related words together for emphasis. He writes that we are to pray with all kinds of prayers and requests. The word translated “prayers” is the general word for prayer. It conveys the sense of being in the presence of God and therefore includes the idea of adoration, devotion and worship and not just making requests of God.
The word translated “requests” is translated supplication in many of our English translations. It comes from a word that means to want or to beg. It refers to making known specific needs and even conveys a sense of urgency.
By putting these two words together and preceding them with the word “all”, Paul is making the point that we are to pray with prayer upon prayer. Prayer is so essential that we need to employ every kind of prayer imaginable – group prayer, individual prayer, silent prayer, shouting prayer, walking prayer, kneeling prayer, prostrate prayer, angry prayer, thankful prayer, confessing prayer, exalting prayer, rehearsed prayer, spontaneous prayer, groaning prayer. You can find examples of every one of those kinds of prayers and a whole lot more in the Bible.
The idea here is that there is an appropriate kind of prayer for whatever you are facing in life. So there is absolutely no excuse not to pray.
3. The resolve of prayer
With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying…
This is another one of those places where our English translations have a hard time capturing the intensity of Paul’s instruction. A more literal translation would be something like this:
…continually being watchful in all perseverance and supplication…
We’ve already touched a bit on the idea of perseverance in prayer when we looked at the idea of praying at every opportunity. But what really strikes me here is the concept of being watchful in prayer. Jesus had previously connected the need to be watchful with prayer as He spoke to His disciples:
Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak."
Mark 14:38 (NIV)
In that context, Jesus used the idea of being watchful in a very individual context. He was encouraging His disciples to be on guard for those things that might tempt them to sin so that they could pray about them. And we would certainly be wise to do the same.
We tend to picture prayer as something that we do with our eyes closed and our head bowed and our hands folded, but it is interesting to note that prayer posture is never found in the Scriptures. The Jews normally prayed with their eyes open toward heaven and their hands lifted toward God. No soldier can afford to close his eyes to the enemy. So Paul and Jesus both encourage us to be watchful as we pray. And that is actually much more a function of what we do with our spiritual eyes than our physical ones. The posture of prayer is not nearly as important as seeing what is going on around us with our spiritual eyes.
But given the context of our passage, Paul seems to have a much more others focused type of being watchful in mind. That will be very apparent when we come to the last “all” in our passage in just a moment. I’m convinced that Paul is exhorting his readers, and us, to be watchful of what is going on with the people around us. He’s encouraging us to be mindful of the needs of others. And he’s not just talking about the superficial and the physical here. That is clearly evident when we look at how Paul prays for others. He doesn’t focus on their physical and emotional needs, but rather for their deep spiritual needs.
Frankly, it’s pretty easy to be aware of the superficial, primarily physical needs of those around us. Let’s be real honest, when we share prayer needs within our body, these types of needs dominate our corporate prayer life as well as our individual prayer life.
But it takes perseverance and continual watching to really know what’s going on with the people around us. I think that’s why so much of our prayer tends to be a response when the disaster comes rather than preventative prayer that might have prevented the disaster in the first place. Unfortunately, most of us are much more diligent with the preventive maintenance on our cars that we are with being watchful when it comes to praying for the needs of others.
Do you really know the needs of the people around you, do you know the spiritual needs of your spouse, of your children, of your friends, of your neighbors, of the people in this body? Do you persevere in prayer for them as they fight the battle?
4. The recipient of prayer
…for all the saints.
When Paul refers here to the saints, he is not speaking of some class of “super Christians”. In fact, he used that very same term at the very beginning of his letter, where he identified the saints as those who are “faithful in Christ Jesus”. So Paul is instructing his readers here to pray for their brothers and sisters within the body of Christ.
Someone once said that “we learn to pray by praying for others”. Most people do a pretty good job of praying for themselves. Even someone who claims to be an atheist will tend to cry to God for help when they get in trouble. We’ve all heard the saying, “There are no atheists in the foxhole.” But we really learn the essence of praying when we pray for others.
Before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona and Madrid and other parts of Spain there were psychological clinics that had arisen all over the land of Spain and they had large numbers of neurotics and these neurotics were undergoing series of treatments. But as soon as the Civil War came one of the first and most striking effects of the war was that it virtually emptied all these psychological and psychiatric clinics in Spain.
Later studies revealed the primary reason for this incredible development. As one writer said, "These neurotic people were suddenly cured by a greater anxiety." The anxiety about their whole life - whether their homes would still be there, whether their husbands would be alive, whether their children would be killed - got rid of the lesser ones. In having to give attention to the bigger problem they forgot their own petty problems.
There is a lesson for us there. If you want to have a healthy spiritual life, then persevere in praying for the spiritual lives of others. When we devote our lives to praying for the needs of our brothers and sisters in Christ, we won’t have time to worry about our own petty anxieties.
So we need to pray with these four “all’s”
• on all occasions
• with all kinds of prayers and requests
• with all watchfulness and perseverance
• for all the saints
But there is one qualifier that Paul gives for all four of these principles. He writes that we are to “pray in the Spirit”. So what exactly does he mean by that.
Praying “in the Spirit”
The concept of “praying in the Spirit” is another one of those places in Scripture where a passage has been taken out of context and been completely misunderstood and misused. Paul is not writing here about some emotional, ecstatic experience. He is not describing praying in tongues or some ecstatic language. In fact, if taken in its proper context, it’s pretty easy to determine what Paul means here.
As I mentioned before, the paragraph break between this verse and verse 18 in many of our English translations is unfortunate, because verse 18 is connected both grammatically and thematically with verse 17. So let’s look at the last part of verse 17 again:
…and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God
In verses 17 and 18 there are two references to the Holy Spirit. In verse 18, we are to pray in the Spirit and verse 17 tells us exactly how to do that. To pray in the Spirit simply means to pray in a way that is consistent with the sword of the Spirit, which is God’s revelation of Himself in His Word. So praying in the Spirit is praying in a manner that is consistent with the nature and will of God. That is confirmed in Romans where Paul describes the role of the Holy Spirit in our praying in more detail:
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 with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.
Romans 8:26, 27 (NIV)
Isn’t that exciting? Even when we don’t know what to pray for someone else, God’s Holy Spirit intercedes on our behalf and prays for us. And because the Holy Spirit is God, those prayers are always in accordance with God’s will.
As we discovered when we looked at the armor of God, the very essence of that armor is saturating our lives with the Word of God and then living our lives consistently with what we learn there. And when we do that, we give the Holy Spirit access to our lives. In a sense, it’s kind of like tuning into a radio station. If I want to listen to a particular station, I have to take my radio and tune it to that station in order to hear what is being broadcast. When I align my life with God’s Word, then in effect I’m tuning into God so that I can hear what He is broadcasting for me.
How many times have all of us experienced a nudge from the Holy Spirit to pray for someone else? Seemingly out of nowhere, we get the sense that we are to pray for someone, many times not even knowing why they need our prayers. And I’m convinced that the more we live a life that is consistent with God’s Word, the more the Holy Spirit can lead us to pray that way. And when we do that, we can be assured that we are praying in the Spirit according to God’s will.
If praying in the Spirit means praying according to the will of God as He reveals it in his Word, then it seems to me that the subject of those prayers ought to be consistent with the depth of the prayers that we find in Scripture.
There is no doubt that God is concerned with our physical needs. Jesus fed people and healed them. But He had a far greater purpose in mind than just meeting their physical needs. I think that Paul certainly recognized that and that is why his prayers dealt with the deep spiritual issues of life. We rarely find Paul praying for his own needs or asking others to do so. We’ll look at one of those few exceptions next week and we’ll find that even then, the purpose of the prayer was to equip him to build up others in their faith.
In just a few moments, we’re going to have a time of prayer. I’ve intentionally, kept my message shorter this morning so we’ll have time to apply what we’ve learned. But before we do that, I want to lay down some guidelines for that prayer time:
• You can’t pray for yourself. This time is only for you to pray for the other saints in this body. I want you to look around this room and ask God who He wants you to pray for during this time.
• At the bottom of your sermon outline, I’ve given you two prayers of Paul that we’ve already seen in Ephesians. I want you to use those prayers as a guide as you pray for the other person. In effect, what you’re going to do is to take God’s Word and pray it back to Him and just put the other person’s name in the appropriate place.
• Even if you’re aware of some physical need in the other person’s life, don’t focus on the physical need, but on the deeper spiritual need that might relate to it. For example, let’s say that you know someone is going in for surgery next week. Don’t pray about the surgery or for the doctors and medical personnel. Instead, you might pray that the person you are praying for would use the helmet of salvation to protect their minds from any doubt and discouragement that the evil one might try to bring against them.
As I mentioned at the beginning, this message is certainly at least as much for me as for any of you. So let me close with a quote from E.M Bounds in his book, The Weapon of Prayer, that I found particularly convicting this week.
Not to pray is a denial of God, a denial of His existence, a denial of His nature, and a denial of His purposes toward mankind.
Praying men are the only men in which the Holy Spirit dwells, for the Holy Spirit and prayer go hand in hand. The Holy Spirit never descends upon prayerless men. He never fills them, He never empowers them. There is nothing whatever in common between the Spirit of God and men who do not pray.
