Wednesday, April 25, 2018
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—

Another weapon of war for the Christian is prayer. As simple and as obvious as this is, some may be surprised that a prayer is sometimes a warfare act.

But before we get to that, we have to recognise that prayer is a very difficult thing for the contemporary Christian with all of the activity and distraction in our lives.

For many, we just have to ‘say our prayer.’ Saying our prayers refer to an act, that we were taught, especially when we were young, of repeating some predetermined set of words that address the basic daily situations of waking up in the morning, going to bed at night, and before meals.

But these prayers, learned by rote, especially the ones we were taught as children, cannot be considered to be a part of a robust prayer life. The many examples of prayer in the Bible would easily confirm this for us. There are those of us who are left at the level where we are just ‘repeating those prayers, while others are learning to really pray.

Some of us wake up in the morning and mumble a few words, while others of us get up during the last watch of the night and travail before God. Some of us have knees that are marked with the time we have spent before God, while some only know of a good solid 60 seconds of prayer. Some of us have to be ‘up on the wall’ when the enemy is building siege works around the city, and we have to rebuke and cast down, while others are in the city foraging for what morsels are left. Some of us have to defend the family, while the others sleep all night and half the day. Some of us have to defend the church, while others just want to know when we’ll get air conditioning. Some of us have to be ‘in the temple’ before God when the enemy is still a far off because we are not unaware of his schemes.

These differences in approaches may be a result of how we think about prayer and what we have been taught about prayer. Here is a definition of prayer from Andrew Murray, a South African writer, teacher and Christian pastor from the late 1800s and early 1900s, “There is a holy and most glorious God who invites us to come to Him, to converse with Him, to ask from Him such things as we need, and to experience what a blessing there is in fellowship with Him. He has created us in His own image and likeness and has redeemed us by His own Son, so that in prayer with Him we might find our highest glory and salvation.”

Prayer then should be one of our life’s pursuits, even before we consider issues in the theatres of war. Many of us, however, fall very short of this.

In the passage in Ephesians 6:10-20, Paul, having outlined the believer’s armour, our defensive equipment, he then introduced the weapons, “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,” and then he goes on to mention prayer right after. While he did not, at this point, state explicitly that prayer is a weapon the context and activities make it at the very least a warfare act.

Paul essentially said that prayer is vital in the war theatre. Once we have put on the defensive armour and taken up the offensive sword, we are to remain in prayer on the battlefield and remain in prayer for the others in the battlefield that they might be able to use their weapon by declaring the word of God.

The story of the attempt on Jerusalem when Hezekiah was king illustrates this principle well. Hezekiah is in the city and the Assyrian army is getting set to surround the city and cut it off from all support until they surrender or die. Hezekiah is in fear for his life, his family, his city, his nation. Already, 46 cities in Judah have fallen to the Assyrians led by Sennacherib and now Jerusalem is the last bastion and the messengers of darkness have come to announce that this is the end for them.

The next warfare action the King took in the middle of the coming siege was to go to the temple to pray, 2 Kings 19:14-19. Hezekiah went into the presence of God while the armies of Assyria were arrayed in the battlefield. They were moving their weapon systems and their soldiers towards Jerusalem. They had weakened the nation, Judah was ripe for the picking the demons of hell were celebrating as their pawns were doing their bidding.

The New Testament was not written yet but Hezekiah knew that “though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God” 2 Corinthians 10:3.4. And he knew that he did not really have to “wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12. So he went into the presence of God and laid out the letter before God and prayed.

In the middle of a war, he employed the offensive weapon of prayer and had victory over the enemy.

Think on these things:

1. How much time do you actually spend in prayer?
2. Do you know how to pray beyond repeating the prayers you’ve learned by rote?
3. Have you ever been in a situation where all the odds were against you and you only got out after you spent time in prayer?

Prayer focus:

Let us pray today that we would learn to war with prayer..

In His Grace
Pastor Alex