An Exhortation to Pray
by Pastor Ricky Kurth
Did you hear about the woman who bowed to pray on New Year’s Eve,
saying, “Lord, for the coming year, I pray for a fat bank account
and a thin body. And whatever You do, please don’t mix the two up
like You did last year.”
While Christians often forget to pray for others, most of us remember to
pray for ourselves, especially when it comes to things like that!
Of course, you wouldn’t think a pastor would forget to pray for
others, but pastors are Christians too. So Paul wrote to Pastor Timothy,
saying,
“I exhort therefore, that, first of all supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men” (I Timothy 2:1).
Now, when Paul only exhorts Timothy to pray after charging
him to “teach no other doctrine” (1:3,18), it’s easy to conclude
from this that praying is not as important as teaching. But
an exhortation from God is a serious thing! After the Lord told the
Jews that “the blood of all the prophets” would be “required of this
generation” (Luke 11:50,51), Peter chose to “exhort” them, “saying,
Save yourselves from this untoward generation” (Acts 2:40). That
sounds serious to me! And when Paul then exhorts us to pray,
we know that prayer must be just as serious a matter in the eyes of
God.
As we look back to the previous chapter to see why Paul would exhort
Timothy to pray “therefore,” we see that Paul just finished charging
him to “war a good warfare” (1:18). Well, what does every soldier do
before going into battle? He prays! I don’t care if he’s a Christian or
not. An old saying says, “There are no atheists in foxholes!”
Yet, as Christians, it is so easy to forget that God has called us to
“wrestle… against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of
the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places”
(Ephesians 6:12). After Paul went on in that passage to describe the armor God
gave us to conduct that warfare (v. 13-17), he exhorted the Ephesians to
pray (v.18). Naturally! After donning his armor, every Roman soldier was
certain to pray to his god, and so must we.
Beloved, we must pray for the lost with whom we share Christ, and
we must pray for the saints with whom we share the mystery, if we
hope to “war a good warfare” against the wicked spirits that are
keeping them in darkness with their “doctrines of devils” (I Timothy 4:1).
If you are laboring to bring souls to Christ and then build them up in the
faith, why not follow the example of Epaphras, who was “always laboring
fervently…in prayers” that people might “stand perfect and complete
in all the will of God” (Colossians 4:12).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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