Carrying Our World to the Father

In prayer the soul is unearthed, and the deepest passions of life come to the surface. When we engage in heartfelt devotion, it becomes a vulnerable thing when people are within earshot—because we are what we pray. 

If someone were to bottle up all my prayers from the year and transcribe them for me to review, what would I learn? What conclusions would come to my mind concerning myself? Would I come away from that reading encouraged or discouraged? 

Engaging in such an experience would reveal to someone whether they were growing in the kingdom of God or fading in their relationship with the King of kings.

Many prayers are kindled by striking the flint of faith upon the hard substance of self—thus creating sparks that gravitate around our selfish needs. Our thanksgiving comes from what God did for me; our requests are about what God can do for me. These thoughts are not wrong in themselves, but if they constitute the bulk of our prayers, perhaps they indicate a systematic issue surrounding what governs our spiritual motivations. When we struggle in the shallow waters of prayer, we are easily intimidated by the call to a greater prayer life like that of the apostle Paul.

Eavesdropping on Paul’s Prayer Life 

“And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Phil. 1:9-11).

There must have been times Paul prayed about his own needs—Jesus has told us to pray for our daily bread—but his prayers extended beyond himself and reached out to his community far and wide. His prayers extended both to people that he had personally met and to those he had only heard about. Most of the prayers that we are privy to are of the latter type and are focused on the four corners of his known world. He constantly thought and prayed for others. 

Every Remembrance of You

In Paul’s letters to the Philippians and Colossians he reveals one of the major highways of thought that went through his brain: He constantly thought about kingdom communities on earth. “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine making request for you all with joy” (Phil. 1:3, 4); “We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of your love for all the saints” (Col. 1:3, 4). 

How could Paul have that kind of dedication to others in prayer? 

When we look at a major figure such as Paul or Moses, we might be tempted to say that we are made up differently from those men, so our prayer life will be different. But is this true? Did great men pray amazing prayers because they were made up of more noble substance than others? 

When we struggle in the shallow waters of prayer, we are easily intimidated by the call to a greater prayer life like that of the apostle Paul.

No, Paul was not born with a nature that made him more spiritual than his neighbors. But he did come to understand something about his nature that only grace and peace can perform, and that is one of the reasons he starts many of his letters in this way. 

Grace and Peace

What happens when God mingles pure grace in the human heart and sprinkles untainted peace upon the mind? Things begin to change. Sins that mark a person with death, sins that could not be forgiven or atoned for through human effort, find their end in the grace of God on the cross of Calvary. Any remaining thoughts of a void between that person and God vanish in their own irrelevance. Then the peace of God’s righteousness encircles the estranged party, and they are welcomed at God’s table. When the leaven of heaven does its powerful work on the whole person, the two powerful agents of change—grace and peace—transform the person to think differently. Once that happens, their prayers change. 

There is no limit to what grace and peace can do for a sinner who accepts these gifts. That is why Paul says it this way: “Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6). And he prayed as though it could be true of any person.

Paul penned this verse as he looked in the mirror and saw that it was true of himself. He could look back on the decades of his converted life, see the changes, and notice the deep effect that the grace of God’s love and the satisfaction of the Almighty’s peace had on his life. He had been changed, yet he was still changing. I often wonder what Satan does when he sees his subjects changed by grace. Notice what this quote says about him: 

“The Lord Jesus is making experiments on human hearts through the exhibition of His mercy and abundant grace. He is effecting transformations so amazing that Satan, with all his triumphant boasting, with all his confederacy of evil united against God and the laws of His government, stands viewing them as a fortress impregnable to his sophistries and delusions. They are to him an incomprehensible mystery. The angels of God, seraphim and cherubim, the powers commissioned to cooperate with human agencies, look on with astonishment and joy, that fallen men, once children of wrath, are through the training of Christ developing characters after the divine similitude, to be sons and daughters of God, to act an important part in the occupations and pleasures of heaven.”[*]

That’s why Paul prayed the way he did; it was an incomprehensible mystery that a man who had fulfilled Satan’s will so perfectly could transform so wondrously into God’s image. 

Paul’s Intercession

In his prayer Paul employed his faith to advocate for others. He yearned for the individuals he prayed for to develop a profound comprehension of the divine kingdom. He pressed the throne of grace with the petition that their love would go deeper to match their Father’s love. He desired that their lives would bear the fruit of righteousness and that it would become vividly evident to all who interact with them that they had come in contact with Christ. Paul wanted their imaginations to be ignited with the full wisdom of God and spiritual understanding.

As he interceded on behalf of the ones who consumed his thoughts, he yearned that they would walk in a way that Jesus would be proud of. Paul had a burden to carry all the names that God put in front of him in prayer. 

How did he learn to do that? The image of the glorified Jesus had been burned into his memory even as he had lost his sight. He had seen Jesus and recognized Him as the true high priest carrying a breastplate of dazzling gems that represented the tribes of Israel. In one of those stones Paul realized that he was being carried to the mercy seat of the Most High through Jesus’ mission of intercession.

If Jesus can carry all the names of the ones He loves to the Father, Paul realized that he needed to bring the ones that he cared for to the place that truly mattered. Jesus carries the whole world close to His heart; Paul learned to carry all those whom he loved to the throne.

The question for us as the body of Christ then is this: Are we carrying all the world to the Father in prayer today?

[*] Ellen G. White, Testimonies to Ministers and Gospel Workers (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1923), p. 18.