This year I've been learning about praying Scripture for people in our lives. For some reason I'd either missed all previous teaching on this or had never heard it and it just had never occurred to me. But it's been a treasure trove for some of those times when I don't know what to pray for as I ought.
So, on the off chance that I haven't been the only one in the dark about this, I thought I'd post about how it works.
It's simple. You take a passage of Scripture and turn each phrase into a prayer for a person or persons. So, the other night I thought that I should pray for a friend who needed wisdom to make a decision. I ended up reading Ephesians 1 and praying through verses 15 to 20. Here's how those verses go:
Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,
In praying through the passage, more than in my previous readings of it, I noticed the magnitude of what God has promised us in Christ, and the amazing gravity of the things we can pray for each other.
What would happen if we were constantly bringing our brothers and sisters to the Lord in prayer asking
- that they would see ever more clearly the lordship of Christ and the glory of the Father
- that they would have a spirit of revelation and wisdom in the knowledge of Him
- that their prayers to know Him more would be answered
- that the eyes of their understanding would be enlightened
- that they may know the hope of His calling
- that they may know the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints
- that they may know the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe
- that they may know that the power we have in Christ is the same mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead
???
And that's only one passage.
He is good!
7 comments:
Great article Emily! I love praying scripture. It keeps me focused. And it gives me topics to pray about for other people. So when you are wondering what to pray for others about.............the Bible is full of ideas!
Thanks, Becky! I've learned a lot from you about praying through Scripture.
This is news to me :P thanks for sharing, I'll try to apply it
Thanks Emily!
Anybody interested in praying through Scripture might like D. A. Carson's book "A Call to Spiritual Reformation" which is essentially an exposition of Paul's prayers in the epistles. I think it is an important book because a possible danger I see in praying through Scripture is that people can be praying words of which they don't know what they mean or worse they might be praying words thinking they have a particular meaning when they really mean something else.
In general, while I cherish the evangeical reverence for the word of God (and high view of Scripture), I feel there is danger of treating the particular sounds and marks as magical. Magical in the sense that they work irregardless of whether we know what they mean. This is why I think it is crucial that evangelicals teach all of Scripture because to understand the meaning of verses often means understanding it in the context of the entire book and even more than that in the context of the entire canon of Scripture.
For example, consider the example of putting on the full armor of God in Ephesians. Many Christians just hear some explanation about Roman armor and the use of the different pieces of armor. Then they try to relate that to what Paul is saying. However, to me, the much more crucial background is the understanding of OT warfare; God versus Pharoah, God in the conquest and enabling the Davidic king to sort of have "rest" from their enemies, and God versus the idols. Then in the NT the sense in which the gospel is about Christ crucified and risen as trimphant over the powers of the fallen order of law, sin, death, Satan, the rulers, the world. The the passage needs to be seen in its connections with themes from the rest of Ephesians. Then when we get to the passage on putting on the full armor of God what a powerful passage it is!
I know the intention of the post was definitely never to treat the words of Scripture as magic. However, with scriptural literacy being so low, and from what I have seen in many books on praying Scripture, I think it is important for people to keep this comment in mind.
Anonymous,
another thing to keep in mind is Romans 8:26-27.
Romans 8:26-27 is an assurance from God that His Holy Spirit will intercede on our behalf in prayer.
Kiwi,
True we do have an assurance about the Spirit but the danger of "magic words" or words prayed without understanding remains just as great.
God can use a donkey to give a word from God but that sure doesn't mean a preacher should feel any less of the weight of the need to be well studied so they can be one who can rightly divide the word of God.
As I understand it, in the early church, there were "new believers classes" that would be so long that they would have probably heard the whole Bible read along with sermons/expositions of the whole Bible by the time the class was over.
I just speak from my own experience of memorizing verses when I was younger and just from what I observe.
Anyhow, since you didn't expand, maybe I totally missed the sense of what you were saying. If so, I apologize.
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