Let's pray

Eph 6:18

¹⁸And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.

Prayer is the essence of a believer's relationship with God. When Paul said that we should "...pray continually..." (1 Thes 5:16-18 NIV), what did he actually mean? Did he mean that we should spend many hours in prayer?

When Paul instructed us to pray in the Spirit on ALL occasions, how can we? Did he mean that we should make quick, brief prayers as a habit and daily response to our every situation? If we do that, we will be very busy all day long praying. We may have to isolate our-self from people and work in order to pray continually. By so doing, it does appear that we are dependent upon God for every situation. Or does it?

It is not so much as how long we pray, but how we pray. And again, I do not mean the method of praying but the attitude of it. While it is good and important to spend a regular "quiet time" with the Lord to recharge our spiritual life, how then do we do pray continually with the rest of our waking hours. Is it possible?

We don't necessarily have to isolate our-self at any particular time and pray. I don't think that is what Paul meant.

Looking at Paul's own prayer life, praying continually mean that we should order our life around God's desires and His words so that we become a living prayer. Our very life becomes our prayers. We can make prayer our life and our life a continuous prayer by the help of the Holy Spirit.

Paul further exalted that we should always be praying for the saints (all believers in Christ).

In the article Vicarious Intercession by Oswald Chambers, he wrote that we should "Beware of thinking that intercession means bringing our own personal sympathies and concerns into the presence of God, and then demanding that He do whatever we ask. Our ability to approach God is due entirely to the vicarious, or substitutionary, identification of our Lord with sin. We have “boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus.....Vicarious intercession means that we deliberately substitute God’s interests in others for our natural sympathy with them.”

As an example of how we pray for the saints, let's learn from Paul's prayer for the Ephesians in Eph 3:14-21.

Dear beloved, let's pray as we ought to....let our life be a prayer and our prayer be our life!

God bless.

Steven