To this end also we pray for you always, that our God will count you worthy of your calling, and fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus will be glorified in you, and you in Him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thessalonians 1:11–12)

Christians should pray for what Christ desires. We tend to pray for what we desire and for what we think others desire. We pray about finances, jobs, future spouses, safety, direction for making upcoming decisions, the details of planning events, and relief from pain and sickness. When praying for missionaries, we usually ask first for their security, provision, and health. In small groups and prayer meetings, we mention a potential relocation, a possible job transfer, trouble relating to a teenage daughter, struggle with the in-laws, or this new pain in the lower back area. These things matter to us.

Jesus didn’t pray for such things, at least not in the prayers recorded for us in sacred Scripture. Consider the prayer of John 17. Jesus asked the Father to keep His disciples pure in the midst of a corrupt world. He asked that He sanctify them by His truthful word. He sought their unity among unbelievers so that the world would know that He had been sent by the Father. He asked that they would see His glory and be with Him forever. He prayed this way because His greatest concerns for them were Spiritual and eternal, not physical and temporal. Rarely can the same be said of His students two thousand years later.

 

The Lord’s Prayer List

My high school football coach was known to invoke God’s name now and then, but never in a, strictly speaking, religious sense. However, it always struck me that before and after every game he would lead the entire team in the Lord’s Prayer. I remember having mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I knew that most of the guys saying the words did not know the God to whom they were speaking. On the other, it was moving to hear dozens of my teammates repeating those precious words in the context of a game. One thing that sticks in my mind to this day is that no one had to be taught the lines. They all knew the Lord’s Prayer.

I’m sure you know it, too. But do you have a clear grasp of what our Lord taught the apostles to pray for? Temporal needs do show up in the request for daily bread. But it’s not first. Or second. And percentage-wise, it’s insignificant. The first request on Jesus’ mind is that we regard our heavenly Father to be holy. Specifically, we are to pray that His name be holy to us. This is not the place to go into a full exposition about why that is important, but if you have never studied it, I urge you to do so. It’s a wonderful and powerful endeavor.

I must ask, when was the last time you passionately petitioned the Lord to make His name holy in your life? How about in someone else’s life? (Notice I’m not asking when you last said the words of the Lord’s Prayer.) How often do you pray for this in comparison to health and other temporal needs? If it’s first on Christ’s list, don’t you think it ought to find its way onto our list somewhere and with some sense of urgency?

The second request is that the kingdom of God come to the earth. Do you pray for that? Do you ask the Lord of heaven and earth to bring about widespread obedience across your neighborhood, community, nation, and world? Do you seek the One who can turn the hearts of kings to move them all to a willing obeisance to His glorious throne? We have already considered that all other kings are given their authority for the purpose of honoring the King of kings, and that none of the world’s leaders are doing it. Jesus wants us to pray for them. Do we? The kinds of prayers I most often hear for national leaders are something like, “Lord, help our lawmakers and leaders to make decisions in accordance with your Word and will.” I think what is usually meant is something like, “Keep them from legalizing abortion and homosexuality. Keep them from entering needless, unjust wars. And keep them from stealing our money through ungodly taxes.” Now, don’t get me wrong. Those are good things to seek. However, that is not the same thing as asking that the leaders make those decisions from a sincere desire to serve King Jesus. He did not teach us to pray for generally good morality in the land. He wants us to pray for their allegiance to Him.

After the daily bread comes the request for forgiveness. I would be willing to bet that most of us pray this one. But do we pray as our Lord instructed? He said, “Forgive us as we forgive others.” It just got a lot harder. Do you pray for God to forgive you in precisely the same way in which you forgive those who have wronged you? Can you imagine how much less bitterness and conflict there would be in relationships if we all prayed this more often? Each time I ask this it causes me to do a quick inventory to determine whether I am holding a grudge against someone else. I desperately want God’s forgiveness for all of my sins, so I need to make sure that I am extending that same amount of grace to others.

Then we are told to ask God either to keep us out of the evil one’s path altogether or, if not, to deliver us from his schemes. The devil is out to destroy us or distract us individually, and to divide us corporately. He knows our weaknesses and greatest temptations, which he relentlessly seeks to exploit. As Jesus said to Peter, one-on-one with him we are no match whatsoever; he would sift us like wheat. And yet, how little time do we spend asking God to keep us from his enticing allurements? When did you last pray for a brother or sister to be protected from temptation? Which is more important in the long run, a mass on a friend’s gall bladder or his marital loyalty in light of the attractive new assistant his boss just hired for him? There is no reason we cannot pray for both. But I fear that for most of us, the latter rarely gets asked at all.

 

Paul’s Prayer List

Consider the content of Paul’s prayers. In Ephesians chapters 1, 3, and 6, he sought the Father on behalf of his brothers and sisters for:

• The Spirit to grant them a greater knowledge of Christ
• An enlightened heart
• A deeper knowledge of the hope to which they had been called by God
• Their understanding of the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints
• Their grasp of the immeasurable greatness of His power toward those who believe
• Them to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man
• That Christ would grow in their hearts through faith
• That they would know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge
• That they would be filled up with the fullness of God

And he asked them to pray for him to be bold to proclaim the mystery of the gospel.

Do you pray like that? Again, how does your regular prayer list compare to this one?

 

We Pray For What Matters to Us

Since my first child was born, I have prayed for her to love Jesus and believe the gospel. But recently I realized that my prayers were more urgent whenever her life was in apparent danger; not prayers for her Spiritual health, mind you, but for her physical health. Now, as she drifts into her second decade of life and manifests daily the potential for just or unjust decision-making, I find a greater urgency welling inside to ask the Spirit of God to work in her heart for joyful, Christ-honoring love for Him above absolutely everything else. As the very real possibilities of Heaven or Hell, faith or unbelief, godliness or worldliness lay before her, my prayer concerns are vastly more focused and intense. Who cares if she lives on, only to perish when death finally wins? I must plead with the Mover of hearts to soften hers, or she dies eternally. Because I love her, I seek God for her ultimate good.

This exposes half of the reason we tend to pray for earthly things more than heavenly things: we don’t love people like Jesus loved them. We think that praying for a smooth flight is an expression of love. At one level it may be, but profound love seeks profound blessing. And there is no blessing comparable to a deep, passionate, consistent, faithful, accurate, strong, discerning, increasing knowledge and love of the Son of God.

Think of it this way: Jesus warned that if I love anything more than Him I am not worthy of Him, that not all who say “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven, that if I gain the world I lose Him. If you care about me, you will, above all, desire me to lose my life in order to save it. You, like Jesus, will say, “Who cares if Doug gains the world but forfeits his soul. I will pray for his soul.” If you pray for my temporal happiness, prosperity, health, and the like, you may actually be praying for things that would tempt me to abandon Christ for earthly pleasure. Anyone who loves me will have the same urgency for my soul as I have for my children’s.

The other half of the reason is that we don’t love Jesus more than life. If Christ becomes our obsession, if His glory becomes our preoccupation, if His glory is our all in all, we will be obsessed with others becoming obsessed with Him. We will be preoccupied with others’ preoccupation with Him. We will desire, more than anything else, that others glorify Him. Such a mindset would radically alter our prayer requests.

 

Praying and Persecution

I am comforted to find Paul asking for boldness. He often appears as Super Evangelist, brainier than an angry atheist, more logical than an educated Platonist, leaping goliath beatings in a single bound—the man of zeal. In reality, the regular anticipation of ending up in the hospital or prison of every town he enters would discourage even the bravest of hearts. No one dances into a room knowing he is about to receive thirty-nine lashes, at least not after the first lashing. Paul knew the temptation to soften the message in order to soften the blows. But his love for Jesus outweighed his love for himself. He asked the churches to pray for him to stand boldly in the face of intense persecution so that Christ would be exalted and the gospel proclaimed.

Other disciples shared this mindset. In Acts 4, when believers encountered the threat of punishment for their faith, they prayed not for relief but belief. They took the Scripture at its word. Psalm 2 had forewarned that the kings of the world would oppose Christ. Persecution was the expectation for all who desired to be faithful in this world of Christ-hating sinners. When it came, rather than release, they sought increased courage to fearlessly preach the gospel. More astounding still was the reaction of the apostles in the following chapter after being beaten to within an inch of their lives. Limping from the Sanhedrin’s torture chamber, eyes and lips swollen, backs shredded, crusty with dirt and dried blood, there was no suggestion that God had failed to take care of them, no wondering about whether their friends had lifted them to His gracious throne. Rather, they rejoiced that God counted them worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus. They rejoiced in their suffering! We pray for its elimination. They loved the Lord and knew what the expansion of His kingdom required of them. We love ourselves and want the kingdom to grow with minimal pain or cost. Or perhaps though our rhetoric claims a devotion to His kingdom, our real devotion is to ours.

The worldview of the early disciples was not an enlightened, peaceful, philosophically justified society of progress, economic prosperity, technological advance, and medical miracles. They knew God was conquering the nations for His Son. They knew the nations would rage against His sovereignty. They knew that His servants were not above Him and therefore would suffer as He did. They knew the world would seek to attract their affections through the lusts of the eyes, the lusts of the flesh, and the boastful pride of life. They knew and believed. They considered the cost of discipleship and were willing to pay. They worked hard, not to avoid suffering and eliminate trials, but to love Christ through them. They prayed, not for ease, comfort, and sound bodies, but for endurance, patience, and sound minds no matter what God’s providence brought to them. Our temptation is to escape pain and find pleasure. We are ever in the clear and present danger of becoming Christian hedonists (and not in the Piperisian sense).

 

Conclusion

Spurgeon attributed the success of his gospel preaching to the army of praying saints who sought the Spirit’s transforming power during his services. Where are those praying saints today? Listen during this weekend’s worship service to see which are the more prominent and frequent supplications at church—man’s happiness or Christ’s? Do pastors and worship leaders seek God for the things most important to Him? Is our greatest passion the exaltation and worship of the Lord Jesus Christ? Do we pray like it? When tragedy comes, do we forget that sometimes God causes blindness for the sole purpose of displaying His glory? Do catastrophes make us forget that the storms reveal the power of God, that only He can control them? Have disasters lost their ability to wake us from our spiritual slumbers? Are we deists at heart, no longer believing that this is our Father’s world, and that the Father is first and foremost interested in His only-begotten Son? We are His only by adoption. The benefits of our adoption are vast and awe-inspiring, but we never outrank the Beloved. The universe exists for Him.

My kids pray for the things that matter to them, which usually includes food and fun. They ask for good times and good toys. I didn’t teach them that, it came naturally. What comes super-naturally is the higher priority of the gospel and glory of Christ. Christians are to leave behind childishness and mature into full-grown sons and daughters of the living God. As we do, the content of our prayers will mature as well.