Praying with Paul

Many Christians feel dissatisfied or discouraged with their prayer habits. It’s difficult to set aside adequate time to seek God in prayer and to intercede for the various needs of one’s family, friends, local church, city, and the world. When we do begin to pray, we sometimes struggle to know what to say and may find ourselves praying the same things again and again, seemingly making little progress. How can we experience increasing depth, vibrancy, and growth in our prayer life?

This session introduces Paul’s practices and priorities in prayer and also offers encouragement and practical strategies to carry out what might seem to be impossible biblical commands: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thess. 5:16-18). We must plan to pray if we want to see increasing depth, vibrancy, and maturity in our prayer life. This study will also suggest studying the prayers of Scripture, learning from the prayers of mature believers, and employing other practical lessons from the school of prayer.

For better or worse, all Christians have some sort of default framework for how to pray and what to ask for. Children growing up in believing homes learn to pray from their parents. When college students come to Christ, they adopt the framework for prayer modeled by campus ministry leaders and the Christians that disciple them. Regardless of where we start, we should try to cultivate a more robust and mature framework for prayer. Even though most of Jesus’ disciples had grown up praying in their homes and at the synagogue, they still said to Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1).

In this session, we adopt the same attitude, “Lord, teach us to pray,” and to this end we’ll examine the apostle Paul’s spiritual framework, his perspective and aims, and the specific petitions and thanksgivings that he makes. Paul sets an example by thanking God for signs of His grace in other Christians’ lives, specifically their growing faith and love and their faithful endurance of suffering. We’ll see that Paul’s ultimate goal when he prays is that Jesus’ name may be glorified in us and that we may be glorified in Christ. We’ll examine his request that God might make Christians worthy of His calling and bring to fruition their ambitions and efforts for good by His matchless power. We’ll also seek to learn from the apostle’s example of giving thanks to God for evidences of His grace at work in the lives of other people.

“You do not have, because you do not ask,” according to James 4:2. One reason we do not ask on behalf of other people is that we do not love as we ought. Paul genuinely loved the Thessalonian believers that he led to Christ and began to disciple before he was abruptly forced out of town. He exhorted them as their spiritual father, and he loved and nurtured these believers like a mother caring for her children. Paul gushed with affection, joy, and thanksgiving when he heard news of the faith and love of these believers, evidence that they were spiritually alive.

In this session, we’ll see that Paul’s passion for people motivated his petitionary prayers and pastoral concern for their spiritual maturity. If we are to learn from Paul’s model of prayer, we should cultivate practical, self-sacrificing love for the people around us—in our neighborhood, at our jobs, and especially in our churches. We’ll also see in 1 Thessalonians that Paul loved people and prayed for them with eternity’s values in view.

Our prayers reveal what we believe about God and what we really value and desire. If you were given a record of every petition you made over the last week, what prayers would be at the top of the list as the most frequent? Many of us probably pray regularly for good health, safe travel, material provision, and flourishing for our children. It’s perfectly appropriate to pray about all these concerns. But how regularly and earnestly do we pray for God’s name to be hallowed, for His kingdom to come and His will to be done, for God to open a door for His Word in challenging places, for believers to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord? Such ongoing concerns do not seem to us as urgent as funds to pay the mortgage or a good report from the oncologist. Yet the apostle Paul regularly prays these sorts of petitions for churches he knows well, like the Philippians and Thessalonians, and for churches he has never met, like the Colossians.

This session will consider Paul’s gospel-centered prayer in Colossians 1. We’ll see that Paul persistently thanks God for His work in Christians’ lives and constantly prays that believers would know God’s will so that they may live transformed lives that please and glorify God. This prayer challenges us to examine our priorities in prayer for others—even those we may not know personally—and to reflect on the way the gospel motivates our prayers of thanks and intercession.

Many Christians thank God in good times, pray urgently in hard times, and forget to pray in busy times. It may strike us as strange that the apostle Paul overflows with thanksgiving and prayers for other people while he is confined to a dingy, dark Roman prison cell. Even in the most challenging and uncertain personal circumstances, Paul expresses his deep gratitude and joy to God for the believers’ partnership in the gospel and his unflagging confidence that the sovereign God will finish the good work He began in their lives.

Paul’s short prayer in Philippians 1 can help us overcome our spiritual dryness and excuses for prayerlessness. In this session, we’ll see that the gospel should define our relationships with other Christians and guide our priorities in prayer. Paul’s prayer will also encourage us to overcome the obstacle of perfectionism and self-fulfillment by refocusing our attention on “what is excellent” (Phil. 1:10) according to God’s standards.

Prayer uniquely captures the tension between God’s sovereignty and our responsibility to act. Jesus tells us that “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8), and James insists that “You do not have, because you do not ask” (Jas. 4:2). God is both personal (our Father) and transcendent (in heaven), and He carries out His sovereign work through personal means, particularly the prayers of His people. We must hold together the biblical truths that God is all-powerful and in total control and that we’re responsible to act in accord with His revealed will. When we do so, these truths give us remarkable confidence to pray and also direction for how to pray to the sovereign God and what sorts of things to ask for.

In this session, we’ll see that Ephesians 1 highlights three facets of God’s sovereign work and serves as a model for praying to the sovereign, personal God. Paul’s prayer stimulates us to reflect deeply on God’s powerful work in raising Jesus from the dead and in transforming Christians from the inside out. We’ll also be challenged to pray that we might see foundational spiritual truths with enlightened eyes.

Prayerlessness is often a warning light indicating our ignorance of God. Genuine and vibrant knowledge of God not only instructs us what to pray, but it also encourages us to let our requests be made known to the all-holy, all-loving, all-wise Triune God, our Creator, Savior, and Lord. In Ephesians 3, Paul grounds his petitions in his understanding of God’s revealed character as Father and the salvation He accomplished through Jesus Christ.

In this session, we’ll consider Paul’s two prayers for power and his doxology that celebrates the matchless, praiseworthy power and glory of God. We’ll see that God must empower us by His Spirit so that we might be increasingly transformed into the likeness of Christ. Further, we need God’s power so that we might comprehend the limitless love of God for us in Christ. When we pray for God to strengthen us and other believers in this way, we should recognize that God is able to do abundantly more than we can ask or think and thus respond by praising our all-powerful, glorious God.

Even apostles need prayer. As Paul proclaimed the gospel to the nations, he saw lives transformed and churches planted but also encountered constant opposition, controversies, hardships, and setbacks. Having preached the gospel from Jerusalem to Illyricum, Paul planned to travel to Rome and then Spain to share the gospel with those who have never heard of Christ. But first, he intended to risk his life and his reputation to return to Jerusalem, bringing a financial gift from Gentile churches to the impoverished Jewish believers. So in Romans 15, Paul exhorted fellow believers to intercede for him and his ministry.

In this session, we’ll consider five important lessons from Paul’s request for intercession in Romans 15:30-33. This passage informs how we might pray strategically for pastors, missionaries, and other Christian leaders. Paul also offers us an important example of maintaining a broader, long-term ministry vision while requesting timely prayers for present ministry challenges.