I can remember vividly a day in which God immediately answered one of my prayers. It was the middle of summer in the heat of July. My friends and I were bored and we did everything we could to come up with something fun to do. We eventually decided to build a fort by the curb in my front yard using sheets, tables, chairs, and anything else we could lay our hands on. Within no time the fort was finished and our boredom quickly returned. In a flash of brilliance, I remembered that my dad had made us slingshots. In yet another flash of brilliance, I remembered seeing unripe grapes on the grapevines in our backyard. Within moments we put the fort to good use and had began shooting unripe grapes at every car that passed by. It was a blast! We were laughing and carrying on and having the time of our lives!
In fact, we were so caught up in shooting these grapes at cars that we stopped paying attention to which type of cars we were shooting at! As our luck would have it, a police car turned down our street. Before we even realized what we had done, grapes were bouncing across the police car's windshield and squishing beneath its tires. As the officer swung his car around and flicked on his lights, something told me that my grape shooting days were about over.
About that time my mom came storming out the front door. She was so disappointed with me. She immediately sent me to my room. She told me, "Just wait till your father gets home and hears about this!" Well I didn't have to wait! I was petrified! For the rest of that afternoon the stupidity of what I had done began to sink in. I realized that I could have been arrested. Someone could have been hurt. We could have caused an accident.
Praying powerfully?
As a teenager, I fell to my knees trembling. Through tears I begged God to have mercy on my soul. Okay, actually I prayed for God to lighten my father's wrath! It was a long shot, but I prayed that I wouldn't be spanked or paddled or grounded or yelled at or reprimanded or any of that! You have to understand my dilemma. I prayed this prayer sweating for several hours, all by my lonesome, on my knees and in my closet, through tears.
And did you know that God answered my prayer the moment my Dad arrived home? My heart pounded as I heard my mom recounting the incident in the front room. My heart leaped and skipped a beat as I heard his boots walking down the hall. My heart stopped as the door to my bedroom flung open. I don't even know what my dad said, but God answered that prayer. Unbelievable. Through that experience I became absolutely convinced of the power of prayer! Unfortunately, that prayer never seemed to work the same again!
Unanswered prayer.
There were other prayers that God didn't seem to answer so readily. Like when my grandpa was having heart trouble. Or when my grandma went to the nursing home with Alzheimer's and couldn't say my dad's name. As a child I prayed hard in those situations. I prayed with great faith and confidence, expecting God to work a miracle. It rattled my faith when these important people in my life died. Over time, I stopped thinking of prayer as being powerful. Doubt set in. Whenever I looked at the bulletin and saw the same names on the prayer list unhealed of their diseases week after week, it reinforced my attitude.
I know we don't like to talk about this sort of thing, but over time some of us have developed some really rotten attitudes about prayer and God. Myself included! At times we would rather appear spiritual than to say what is really on our hearts. But let's be honest today. Prayer puzzles us. It is a mysterious instrument. Prayer is like a magic wand that we haven't learned to use properly. One moment we shake it and move mountains. The next moment it is little more than a drumstick making a swishing sound in the air.
Insights into prayer.
About seven or eight years ago I started paying attention to these prayers found in the Bible. There are times when people prayed for healing and God answered those prayers. In James 5:15we are instructed to offer prayers in faith for the sick among us. In Philippians 4:6 we are told to present all our requests to God, indiscriminately.
But most of the prayers are like Paul's prayer in Philippians 1:9-11 (NIV) where he says, "And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ— to the glory and praise of God."
The focus of this particular prayer is on our spiritual health as it relates to God and the Church at large, as opposed to the physical health of any one individual. Hear me very clearly. We should pray for the sick among us! But what I am saying is we should never limit our prayers to only praying for physical healing. In fact, this can be spiritually lethal. Praying is such a limited fashion tends to reinforce false expectations about God's chief work in our lives.
Think about it! Does God only desire for us to be physically healthy? Or is there not a greater good that he desires for us collectively and as individuals? And shouldn't our prayers primarily focus on this grander, nobler purpose? The consensus of scripture passage after scripture passage is that our prayers should be channeled toward the spiritual purposes that God has in store for us. It isn't always God's will that we be physically healed. So it stands to reason that always praying that way breeds frustration, doubt, anger, and even unbelief.
In contrast, getting our prayers aligned with God's grander purpose energizes our prayer lives. It produces confidence and a sense of expectation. Making the spiritual journey evaluations that we just completed a focus of your prayers will ignite deep within your soul a passion for prayer.
Consider Paul's prayer in Philippians 1:9-11. This prayer at once draws us deep into the divine, eternal, grander purpose of God. You can think of his prayer as an onion in which each phrase provides a newer and deeper layer of insight into God's purpose for us in prayer.
Pray for abounding love.
Paul begins, "And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more..." Paul does not show any reservations in this prayer for the Philippians. He is asking God to give them a boundless, limitless, overflowing love. He is asking for a love that continually increases day after day, and never stops growing.
The imagery that Paul is using is that of an empty container being placed beneath a raging waterfall. The container quickly becomes overwhelmed to the point that it can no longer contain all that it is receiving. Paul is essentially praying, "God, let loose the floodgates of heaven and overwhelm these friends of mine with your boundless, limitless love. And keep pouring it on with ever-increasing intensity so that it spills over the rims of their lives and overwhelms all those who are around them." Paul is praying for these Philippians to ooze with love!
Pray for knowledge and insight.
Paul next prays that their love abound more and more, "in knowledge and depth of insight." Here Paul is praying that the Philippians will be able harness the power of God's abounding love so as to channel it in an intelligent and potent direction. It was not enough for the Philippians' love to just overflow and haphazardly spill out on everyone and everything they encountered.
Paul was praying for them to take all the power and energy and abundance of God's overflowing love in their lives and channel it into a concentrated powerful burst of liquid that could be aimed at the strongholds of Satan. Just as the concentrated bursts of Colorado River have been able to slice through layer after layer of hard rock to create the beauty of the Grand Canyon, so Paul is praying for the Philippians to channel their boundless love in such a way as to slice through the spiritual hardness of their world in order to create breathtaking beauty in the lives of those they directed it toward.
Pray for discernment.
Next Paul adds the phrase, "...so that you may be able to discern what is best..." To pray for a powerfully directed, concentrated love is not enough. Paul prays that after considering the vast array of options available to them, the Philippians will choose the right target at which to direct their powerful love.
When I was in college I remember taking my filthy, tar-laden, dust-covered car to the Super Car Wash. As I began spraying my car with the pressure washer the clear coat on my car began flaking off like dried-out icing on a Mello-creme donut. The concentrated stream which had the potential for cleaning my car actually damaged my car because it wasn't used inappropriately. I wasn't following the proper guidelines and was standing too close to my car.
Paul is praying that the Philippians would use great discernment as they directed the intense and powerful stream of their love toward people. Great damage can be caused in the name of love. In the name of love parents can enable and reward destructive patterns of behavior in their children. In the name of love we can become entangled in relationships that can destroy our spiritual lives, our marriages, our families, and our children. In the name of love we can overdo things and drive people away from God. So Paul prays for an abounding, highly concentrated, discerning love that does what is best for everyone involved.
Pray for blamelessness.
Paul next pulls pack another layer of the onion by praying, "...and may be pure and blameless until the day of Jesus Christ." The word pure refers to our relationship with God. The image is that of a person holding a garment up into the sunlight to see if it is stained or dirty. Paul is praying that on judgment day, under the scrutiny of God's light, his friends would be found pure and spotless, without blemish, and free of defect. The word blameless refers to our relationship with one another and to our conduct. Paul is praying that on judgment day, in the presence of witnesses, that his friends would be free of any charge of wrongdoing or of having caused another to stumble or fall into sin.
Pray for righteous fruit.
And then he adds, "...filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ." Paul wants his friends at Philippi to think of themselves as fruit trees in an orchard which is overflowing and ripe with delicious fruit which is pleasing to God. On the day of judgment he wants them to be like trees loaded down with the fruit of righteous deeds. These deeds would be consistent with the character of Jesus Christ. These would be deeds done out of the abundance of their love. These deeds would be carried out with great discernment, wisdom, and understanding. These would be deeds that were unmarred by sin and would be pure before God. These are deeds that would render them blameless in the sight of God and men. And not to go unnoticed, these are deeds generated not of the flesh, but deeds which come from and have their source in Jesus Christ.
And this my friends is where we get to the heart of the power of praying to God. Prayer is a means of transformation. Prayer is a means of becoming more like Christ. Prayer is a means of nudging those around us toward maturity. We deprive ourselves of the joy and experience of answered prayer whenever we fail to pray specifically for others to bear Christian fruit. When you make your own spiritual growth and the spiritual health of those around you a priority in prayer, God moves mountains. He works one undeniable miracle after another.
We often doubt the power of prayer because our prayers are not in sync with the grandest purposes of God. He wants us to become like him.
Pray for God's glory.
At the end of Paul's prayer he adds one last phrase, "...to the glory and praise of God." This is not a meaningless tag line or nicety tossed in at the end of this prayer. This phrase is the climax and central thrust of the entire prayer. Paul was praying for God to powerfully and undeniably work his greatest works in the lives of the Philippians. He prays that as a result of that, people throughout the world would be attracted to God and worship him in praise.
This is really the meat and potatoes of prayer. Prayer is about God and his purposes. Prayer is about redemption. Prayer is about connecting people to their Lord and Savior and King and Creator and God. Our primary focus in prayer is not in making this life our destiny, but rather in preparing our spiritual soul for its eternal destiny with God in Christ.
More important than praying for the sick and for one another to be healed is praying for our souls to be healed, praying for our sins to be forgiven, praying for our faith to be strengthened, praying for our lives to bear fruit that attracts people to God, praying for our lives to ooze with Christ's love, praying for our trees (lives) to bear the fruit of righteous deeds, praying for us to discern what is right, noble, and best, and praying for each of us to be pure and blameless on the day of God's judgment.
Why not cure yourself of an uneventful prayer life? Synchronize your prayers with God's ultimate purpose and plan. Let him unleash his power in your life and in others.