To Encourage You

Colossians 4:12 “Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.”

Matthew 6:10 “Your kingdom come, Your will be done,on earth as it is in heaven.”

Is prayer a struggle for you?  I’ve heard people talk about their struggle to be involved in prayer in that there always seems to be other things vying for their time and attention.  I’ve heard others talk about struggling to just stay awake when they pray.  Some talk about struggling with having their mind wander during times of prayer. So, is that the kind of struggling in which godly men like Epaphras were involved in the verse above from Colossians?  What about Jesus as He prayed earnestly and in great agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44)?  Was His a struggle of just trying to stay awake, for we’re told that the disciples kept falling asleep while Jesus prayed? 

Well, I highly doubt it.  It’s important to note that when Jesus was instructing His disciples on how to pray in Matthew 6, the thing He told them to begin with was worship (Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name), followed by a request that God’s will be done (rather than our own) on earth as it is in heaven.  The fact that God’s thoughts and God’s ways are as high above our thoughts and ways as the heavens are above the earth (Isaiah 5:8-9) raises the difficult proposition of knowing how to ask that God’s will be done.  How often are our prayers primarily an effort to convince God of how important our needs are? I’ve heard people raise their voices and practically shout to God about how this illness or that problem “has to go in the name of Jesus!”  But is that really what God wants? How do we know? 

You see, as Jesus struggled in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, He asked if it would be possible that God would relieve Him of the need to go to the cross.  We are told that He asked this same thing over and over again as He spent three periods of prayer agonizing over this issue (Matthew 26:36-46).  Yet, in the end, Jesus prayed “nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).  In this example, Jesus shows us that His struggle was in conforming the natural desires of His humanity to the supernatural desires of His divinity.  And isn’t that what the struggles of prayer primarily consist of? 

You see, prayer is not to be a struggle with God that our will be done. Rather, it is a struggle against our own human ideas and desires so that God’s will be done. Prayer is a means by which God can conform our will to His will, but in that process, there is often a great struggle.  There can be things in our life that are so overwhelming and pressing that we don’t even know how or what to pray.  We struggle even to pray, yet the Lord tells us to pray about everything (Philippians 4:6-7).  He tells us that we are to be people who “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). 

Perhaps one of the reasons for this is the continual need to have our mind renewed, and to have our thoughts lifted above the natural mindset to the spiritual. You see, to be spiritually minded is life and peace (Romans 8:6), but “the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other” (Galatians 5:17).  One of the places that this can be most evident is in our prayer life. James warns us of this very thing when he tells us “You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:2-3).

May God help us in our prayer life to engage in the struggle to conform our will to God’s will and not the other way around. It’s a struggle that is well worth it for it’s a struggle that will ultimately bring glory to God.