All Prayer (Part 1 of 2)

Exercise is important for good health.

We all know that's true, but that doesn't mean we work out regularly. In the same way, prayer is essential for every believer. And yet, if we're honest, many of us would admit we don't pray as we should.

So where do we begin? Well, today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg outlines a framework for how and when to pray. I invite you to turn with me to Ephesians and to chapter 3, as we continue to heed the exhortation of Paul in chapter 6 in relationship to the importance of prayer. We read one of his examples of prayer as he prays here from verse 14.

Ephesians 3 and verse 14. For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. Gracious God, as we turn now to the Bible, we pray for the help, the enabling of the Holy Spirit to teach and to listen, to understand, to believe, to obey, to live in the light of its truth. Accomplish your purposes in us, Lord, we pray. For Jesus' sake.

Amen. Well, as we come to the end of Ephesians, and we have spent some significant time in this final section, it's important for us and helpful for us to keep in mind that this is not a section that exists on its own. It is the closing part of one letter, and it is also the concluding part of what we referred to as we began chapter 4 as the more practical part of the letter. We said that Paul, in the way in which he wrote his letters, would lay down what was indicative, what was true doctrinally, and then, on the strength of that, he would come to the imperatives and to the so-whats and to the therefores and to the application. And if you turn back just one page in your Bible, you'll be reminded of the fact that this practical section began by his exhortation, his urging his readers to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. And he then is going on to point out that to walk in this way is to walk, first of all, in a culture that is alien. It is to walk alongside others who are part of the family of God in a church that is made up not of people just like us but of people often very different from us—different by background and by age and stage of life, and in other ways too. It is to walk worthy in the framework of our everyday lives, in the workplace. And it is to discover what it means to walk in this way within family life and within marriage and in the raising of children. In other words, in short order, he is pointing out now as he reaches this final section that all of this walking is taking place, if you like, in a war zone.

And that is why he has come to the end of it, and he has pointed out the importance of putting on the armor and of picking up the weapons. And he has begun to make clear to his readers, and I hope to us, that in the spiritual battleground, prayer is absolutely essential. And one of the ways in which we can gather that from Paul's letter here is simply in the amount of space he gives to this matter of prayer.

You will notice—and some of you put together that way may even count the number of words that we have in English—but it is clearly disproportionate. And it is also important for us in recognizing that to remind ourselves that he is not addressing this, first of all, to us as individuals. In fact, he's not writing to an individual. He's writing to a community of believers. He is writing to those whom he addresses at the very top of his letter as the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus. Now, when he uses that word saints, it's important for us to understand that what he's describing there is not some unique group of individuals separated from all the rest, but it is simply a New Testament word for all who have become the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. And they are saints.

They are set apart as holy in Jesus. So it is to these individuals that he issues this comprehensive call—a call that is as important for us today in twenty-first-century Cleveland as it was for the first readers in first-century Ephesus. We considered last time the fact that prayer is something of a mystery. We reinforced the fact that it is an absolute necessity, and then we began to consider the activity itself. And so it is from there that we proceed, praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.

Those alls—and there are four of them—give to us the framework of this study. First of all, then, our praying is to be at all times. Whenever we are on the receiving end of an exhortation from someone, it's almost inevitable that we say, Well, I wonder if he or she is actually doing that herself. And we need be in no doubt in relationship to this concerning Paul, because we can go back through the letter and find him saying, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. In other words, he is absolutely true to what he is now urging upon his readers. He is praying all the time.

All the time. Now, this whole matter of constancy or consistency is something with which I think all of us, if we are prepared to be honest, wrestle. Therefore, it is a quite remarkable thing, isn't it, when we come across somebody who is able to say to us, I will pray for you and then does pray for you? I've told you before of my deep affection for the late Alec Matia, how I had occasioned years ago—1986, I think it was—to be in a conference with him in the north of Ireland. And on that occasion, we walked each afternoon—I think I've told you this before, but I've started, so I'll finish—and we walked in the afternoon. At the end of the time, he said, My dear boy, I will pray for you.

I will pray for you. And I said, Thank you. Well, some time elapsed, maybe a year, maybe two, and it was on a good Friday in the afternoon that I had reason to go to one of his books, a commentary on Isaiah. And as I was held by the commentary, I thought, You know, I've never spoken to Alec since that time. I think I'll just call him up and say hello. And so I went on the phone, out of the blue, Hello, Alec, said hello. And he said, Before you say anything, he said, You'll be interested to know that Beryl—that was his wife—Beryl and I have just had a cup of tea.

And this would probably be nine o'clock in the evening. And he said, And before we had our tea, we remembered you in prayer. And we prayed for Susan, for Cameron, for Michelle, and for Emily.

There's no way in the world he could pull my kids' names out of the blue. The only reason he knew them was because he prayed for them. T.S. Mooney, my little friend from Ireland, was the exact same. When they found T.S.

Mooney dead at the age of eighty-three in his bedroom, he was fully dressed in his little tweed suit, had his tie on, and he was kneeling on the floor, and he was over his bed. When they removed his body, they found that underneath him had been his Bible and his prayer lists. And he is the one who, when he would write to me, would say, I remember you daily at the best place. Now, some of you are prayer partners to people. Do you realize what an amazing privilege that is?

That you are able to go to the living God, the Creator of the ends of the earth, and seek him on behalf of a brother or a sister or a place all the time? All the time? Continually? Not spasmodically. But, you know, such a call makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Because the battle goes on continually.

Therefore, the need for prayer is in the same realm. I remember reading some years ago now of a resident in New York City who used to go routinely to a delicatessen, where I think it was a Korean man who was the proprietor. And on one occasion, as he'd gone in some strange hour of the early morning, maybe two or three in the morning, he said to the proprietor, he said, You know, I've never come in here, but you are here. He said, Why are you here? Twenty-four-seven.

And the man said, Because I pay rent twenty-four-seven. There's a lesson for all the economists among us. Why would you pray continually? Because we face the battle continually. Now, it's important as well, when we think about this, that we don't imagine that Paul is suggesting that every so often, like every time they encounter something along the way, they stop and they have a sort of formal prayer meeting, you know, so that all these members of Ephesus are bringing everything to a crashing halt in their workplace or whatever it might be, because they have to engage in prayer in this way.

No, I don't believe that he has that in mind at all. I think probably what he is recognizing is the fact that the prayers of the faithful may be loud, they may be audible, but they often will be inaudible. The hymn writer gets it well when he provides us with this terminology. Prayer is the soul's sincere desire expressed in thought or word. The burning of a hidden fire, a longing for the Lord. This is prayer.

So it is expressed both in thought and in word. So, continually engaged, as it were, with the living God. Prayer is the secret battleground where victories are won.

By prayer the will of God is found, and work for him begun. So in short order, this call to all prayer is an expression of our dependence upon God. It's not optional. It is essential. Because actually, it is impossible for us to enjoy an intimate relationship with God without it. No less than the fact that you can't enjoy an intimate relationship with your spouse, apart from the engagement of communication. Not necessarily talking all the time.

You can drive in the car for fifteen or twenty miles and never talk. But there is communion. That's the first all.

Then the second all you will see is right there in the text as well. Praying at all times. And then, with all prayer.

What does that mean? Well, the NIV translates it with all kinds of prayer and requests. That is helpful, and I think that is exactly what Paul is saying. He's talking about the way in which we come to God in prayer.

Some of us have learned through our years as Sunday school students and then in Bible classes the importance of acts, helping us to remind ourselves that part of prayer is, A, for adoration. That we come to God, as it were, in the words of the popular song, I just called to say, I love you. Nothing more, nothing less. Were you ever worried by your children doing that? Did you ever say, Oh, that's an irrelevancy?

Not for a moment. They called you from college. I'm busy right now, but I just wanted to say, we come to God like that. Adoration.

Sometimes we might write a poem and say it. C for confession. Recognizing that, as Luther says, repentance is not something that triggers off our Christian life, but that repentance is a daily experience. Saying to God in the course of a day, catching ourselves, I confess to you, Father, that I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

T for thanksgiving. Thanking God in our prayers, I will enter his gates with thanksgiving in my heart. I will enter his courts with praise. I will say, This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice, for he has made me glad. What I find most helpful about that is it's entirely volitional.

None of it is emotional. So the real test of our thankful hearts is when there doesn't really appear to be very much for which to be thankful. When it was raining, like Glasgow, your immediate reaction, at least mine, is not to go, This is the day the Lord has made. It's to go, Man, I hate this day.

This is what it used to be like. No, you see, it is an expression of who God is and what really is. Supplication. S for supplication. Or petition.

Or expression of needs. Coming to God and acknowledging that it is entirely legitimate to ask, to knock, to seek. Indeed, he bids us do this. He bids us come and tell him exactly what's going on and where our concern lies and what we're really interested in.

And sometimes they're big things, and other times they're small things. Daniel in chapter 9 comes to God. He says, O my God, incline your ear and hear my prayer.

Delay naught for your own sake, because your city and your people are called by your name. You see the significance of that? He's not concerned about himself. He's concerned about God and his glory. How vastly different from most of my prayers. How vastly different from the average time of prayer when a small group gets together and says, Now let's pray. Learning to pray, enabled by the Holy Spirit and guided by the Scriptures, will inevitably focus our eyes on the gospel and the glory of God and the purpose of the church. It is a real tragedy, isn't it, when in conversation with those whom we love, it has become entirely perfunctory, saying the same things over and over again.

In fact, instead of it being marked by variety, it is marked by monotony. And so I said to myself this week, I need to learn to pray. I said with the disciples, I'm sure you've done in the week that has passed, Lord, teach us how to pray. Teach me to pray when I walk along the road, when I lie down, when I get up. Teach me to pray formally in structured prayers, as I have to. Teach me to pray standing or kneeling, audibly or inaudibly, publicly or privately. Teach me to pray groaning. Teach me to pray crying. Teach me to pray. It's a long time since we studied Nehemiah for the first time.

It was actually 1983. And when we began to look at that book together, we realized that the immediate response of Nehemiah to the condition of the people of God in Jerusalem was for him to sit down and to weep and then to pray. And his opening prayer is fairly extensive. But as we began to work our way through the book, we realized that he didn't always pray at such length. In fact, some of his prayers we would regard as what we refer to as arrow prayers—just fired it straight up immediately. And, for example, he, on one occasion confronted by the animosity of the folks who were against him, said, So we prayed to our God, and we posted a guard. Or when going to the king to make his request, he said, So I prayed to the God of heaven, and I said to the king.

There probably wouldn't be very much in that. It's just a silent prayer. O God, help me. You see, often prayer is actually in the groaning and in the crying. You know, it's true that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. You remember when Isaiah, in the midst of his circumstances, he says, Oh, oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down. There's a ton just in the oh.

Oh! God listens to our ohs. He listens to our groans.

In fact, we know that the Holy Spirit actually makes sense of our groans. So that we pray constantly, and we pray variously, and thirdly, we pray perseveringly. All perseverance to that end.

Keep alert with all perseverance. In other words, we dare not be overcome by dreamy carelessness—the way in which the disciples were overcome by a kind of dreamy carelessness. Jesus had said to them, you remember, in the prospect of his death, Watch and pray, so that you do not enter into temptation.

And they did neither, and they found themselves in real difficulty. In many ways, what you have here is an echo of the words of Jesus, and also it is in keeping with what Paul said to the Ephesian elders, which is recorded for us in Acts chapter 20. Before he took his leave of them, he said to them, After my departure there will arise fierce wolves who will seek to draw away people after them and draw them away from all that I have taught you about Jesus and about the gospel. And so he says, Keep alert! Keep alert!

Stay awake! Be watchful! And it is the watchfulness which then is the key to the perseverance. Sinclair Ferguson, helpful as ever, says, Christ is building his church on territory that has been occupied by an enemy.

Alertness is always essential when living in a war zone. Our challenge from Scripture is to be people who stay alert and people who pray. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life.

Alistair will continue this message tomorrow. If you're enjoying our study called Strength for the Battle, maybe you'd like to hear Alistair's complete series of teaching through the book of Ephesians. It's called Grace and Peace.

It includes 85 messages. That's all of Alistair's teaching through all six chapters of Ephesians. Grace and Peace comes on a USB drive.

You can own the drive for just $5. Search Grace and Peace in our online store at truthforlife.org slash store. Let me also mention our featured book this month. It's not often we recommend a book about the devil, but we've been learning that we're in the middle of a battle. It's critical that we know our enemy. That's why we've chosen a book titled Our Ancient Foe, Satan's History, Activity, and Ultimate Demise. The Bible tells us that we have an adversary who prowls around like a roaring lion. The devil is seeking someone to devour. This is an eye-opening book that reveals the plans, the power, and even the presence of the evil one. There are nine chapters in the book written by seven different pastors and scholars, including Alistair's good friend Sinclair Ferguson. They shine the light of Scripture on our ancient foe, identifying who he is, explaining how he operates, exposing his deceit, and ultimately celebrating his final demise.

Don't be caught off guard. Request your copy of the book Our Ancient Foe when you donate a gift of any amount. Online giving is quick and easy. Simply visit our website truthforlife.org slash donate or call us at 888-588-7884. If you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book Our Ancient Foe, write to Truth for Life.

Our address is post office box 39-8000 Cleveland, Ohio 44139. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening. Hope you can join us tomorrow as Alistair continues to teach us about prayer. We know we ought to be people who pray at all times in all ways. What do we do when we don't get the answer we're looking for? The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.