Living Stones – Monday, November 6, 2017
War prayer
Ephesians 6:18
“… praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints …”
In the closing sections of his letter to the Ephesian Christian the Apostle Paul says, “Finally my brothers …” and launches into a description of the Christian life as one of warfare between “kingdoms in conflict,” to borrow the title of Charles Colson’s once popular book.
In chapter 6 verses 10 to 20, Paul frames the Christian life as an intense spiritual warfare between us and a formidable enemy he describes as “principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this age, and spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
That sounds far removed from the faith many of us practice today made up of nice clothes, gorgeous buildings, sophisticated equipment, and a church service that is mostly a choreographed performance.
Many Christians are very familiar with this passage about the Armour of God but are unaffected by it. We could recite the text by heart once we are not expecting any actual spiritual combat. We are familiar with the description of the warrior’s kit but unfamiliar with war itself.
This should not really be our disposition, there is an example for us in the book of Judges in the Old Testament. Chapter 3 starts out, “Now these are the nations which the Lord left, that He might test Israel by them, that is, all who had not known any of the wars in Canaan (this was only so that the generations of the children of Israel might be taught to know war, at least those who had not formerly known it) …” The consequence of an unfamiliarity with war is that when a fight comes we can’t handle it.
As Paul describes the warrior’s weapons he comes to prayer as a weapon of war. This is often missed because the tendency is to stop at the sword of the spirit. Many expositors and preachers have suggested that Paul was looking at one of his guards when he described the armour, and this leads us to think only in terms of the physical pieces of armour that he now gives a spiritual counterpart. We can always carry this analysis too far and miss things.
Paul is actually saying here that, prayer is a warfare act. This is a potentially revolutionary idea since most of us learned to pray as children by being taught simple prayers that we recite, like this child’s bedtime prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray to God my soul to take. If I should live for other days, I pray the Lord to guide my ways.”
The repetition of simple prayers has left a pattern that we continue to practice. Even when we face challenges of our adult life, if we maintain faith in God we want something to recite. We are like the man who called me recently to ask me to send him a prayer appropriate for the particularly difficult circumstance he was facing.
When one of my great aunts turned 75, we invited her parish priest to an event we were having for her to celebrate. Just before cutting the cake one relative asked the priest to say a prayer for the cake. The priest went into his bag, took out his Priest’s Book and started looking for the appropriate prayer. After a few minutes, while we waited, he looked up with a pained expression on his face and said that, “there was no prayer for a cake in the book.”
When Jesus’ disciples asked Him to teach them how to pray He outlined a model of prayer that many of us are still repeating today, just the way it appeared. People put on a pious face and repeat the model prayer but there is no reference to this model being used as an actual prayer in the New Testament. Look at the prayers in the Acts and throughout the epistles, they all have elements from the model prayer, but no one is repeating the “Our Father” as some call it.
Evidently, if we are at war we have to respond to the changing circumstances before us in our strategy, and in the way we deploy our weapons. Prayer then is, in part, a function of the circumstances we’re in and not a recitation we’ve learned.
Think on these things:
- Are your prayers made up of more than just recitations of prayers you learned?
- Can you recall any situation in your life where you had to fight through with your prayers?
- Do you have any situation in your life where the weapon of prayer is required and could you now use it?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that we would recognise that prayer is a weapon of our warfare and learn to use it effectively.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex