Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with
an attitude of thanksgiving; (3) praying at the same time for us as
well, that God will open up to us a door for the word, so that we
may speak forth the mystery of Christ, for which I have also been
imprisoned; (4) that I may make it clear in the way I ought to
speak.

One thing is crystal clear from this passage: it is God's will
that we pray to him. Sometimes we struggle to know the will of God
for our lives. But there are some things that you do not have to
struggle to know. One of them is that God's will is that you pray
to him. The text says, "Devote yourselves to prayer." God wills for
you to pray to him.

Now before we think about anything else - the meaning of
"devote" or the need for "alertness" or time and place and quantity
and method of praying -before all that, just let it sink in that
God wants us to pray to him. He commands it.

What is Prayer?

But to ponder this we do have to ask what "pray" means. Mainly
it means asking God for things. By "things" I don't mean objects -
stuff. I mean, generally, whatever your heart desires or needs.
And, of course, what your heart needs most is God - to know him and
trust him and love him and obey him. I know that we should come to
God with more than asking. We should come confessing sins and
giving thanks and praise. In a broad sense, prayer includes all
that. But, speaking precisely, prayer is requesting, asking. That's
why in Colossians 4:2 it says, "Devote yourselves to prayer . . .
with (or in) thanksgiving." Thanking God should always be part of
what we do in prayer. But prayer, in the strict sense, means
requesting. So I define it as asking God for things.

Let's put beside this a great historic definition of prayer.
There is a story about D. L. Moody making a visit to Scotland in
the 1800's and opening one of his talks at a local grade school
with the rhetorical question, What is prayer? To his amazement,
hundreds of children's hands went up. So he decided to call on a
lad near the front, who promptly stood up and said, "Prayer is an
offering up of our desires unto God, in the name of Christ, by the
help of his Spirit, with confession of our sins, and thankful
acknowledgment of his mercies." This is the answer to question #78
in the Westminster Catechism. To this Moody responded by saying,
"Be thankful, son, that you were born in Scotland."1

Be sure to notice the main thing: "Prayer is an offering up of
our desires unto God." That is the main meaning of prayer. "With
confession of sins" and " with . . . thankful acknowledgment of his
mercies" - these go along with these expressed desires. But the
essence of prayer is the expression of our dependence on God
through requests.

God Loves to Be Asked

Now think about this for a moment. God's will is that we, his
creatures, ask him for things. And it is not just his will, it is
his delight. He loves to be asked for things. Proverbs 15:8 says,
"The prayer of the upright is His delight." He is so eager to hear
prayers and respond to them that he says in Isaiah 65:24, "It will
also come to pass that before they call, I will answer; and while
they are still speaking, I will hear." In fact, he takes special
steps to see to it that he is constantly badgered. I say that
reverently and, I think, truly on the basis of Isaiah 62:6-7 - "On
your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen; all day and all
night they will never keep silent. You who remind the LORD, take no
rest for yourselves; and give Him no rest until He establishes and
makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth." So God loves being asked
for things so much that he appoints people to "give him no rest"
but to "remind the Lord" and "never [to] keep silent."

Meditating on this is very encouraging to our faith and hope.
This means that God, the Creator of the Universe, who holds our
life in his hands and rules the world, is the kind of God who loves
to be asked for things.

I find it also tremendously strengthening to my faith to
meditate further on why this is. Why does God not only will that we
ask him for things, but delight in it and love it like incense
(Revelation 5:8) and take steps to see that it happens? What's
behind this delight in our asking him for things? You might say,
"Well, it's because God is love. It's his very nature to be a
Giver." That is absolutely right. As Paul said in Romans 11:35-36,
"Who has given a gift to him that he should be repaid? For from him
and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory for
ever."

God is always the Giver (see Acts 17:25). That is what he loves
to be. And the last phrase of Romans 11:36 says why, "To him be
glory for ever." It is more glorious to be a Giver than a getter.
Getters look needy. Givers look self-sufficient. So God ordains
prayer because he wants us to see him as gloriously self-sufficient
and ourselves as totally needy. So he says in Psalm 50:15, "Call
upon Me in the day of trouble; I shall rescue you, and you will
honor Me." God answers our call for help so that we get the rescue
and he gets the honor. "I will rescue you and you will honor me."
Similarly in John 14:13 Jesus says, "Whatever you ask in My name,
that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son."
Ask for things in my name! Why? So that the Father may be
glorified. So he may look as glorious as he really is.

Let these truths behind prayer strengthen your resolve to pray
this year. God wills that you pray. He wills that you ask him for
things. And not just wills it, but really delights in it and really
wants it and takes steps to see that it happens, because he enjoys
it so much. Why should we be confident of this? Because it comes
from the very nature of who God is. He is love - he is a Giver. Why
is he a Giver? Because he is utterly self-s ufficient and delights
to overflow and show us his glorious fullness and strength and
wisdom, and that he will give us whatever we need to get us to
everlasting joy in him. God loves to show the fullness of his grace
in meeting the needs of humble, dependent - that is, praying -
people, because it magnifies his riches and makes our joy.

This means that prayer is about as central to the meaning of the
created universe as you can get. God created us, according to
Isaiah 43:7, for his glory. Which we now see means that he created
the universe so that persons created in his image would look to him
to satisfy all their wants and needs so that they would get the joy
and God would get the glory. When we express this looking to God,
we call it prayer.

So prayer is not some small thing. It is not some marginal
thing. It is not some incidental thing in the Christian life.
Prayer is at the heart of why God created the universe. You may
have the modern, secular notion that the universe is really about
great galactic events and supernovas and remarkable expanses of
time and space and energy. But in reality the center of the created
universe is man created in the image of God. And the meaning of man
in the image of God is to display God's glory. And the way God
delights to display his glory in man is by being depended on
through prayer.

It just doesn't get much greater than this. Meditate on this.
Muse on it. It is so rich and will give you great incentives to
pray in 2000. I heard one of you in prayer this week refer to
inhaling the Word and exhaling prayer. That is very good. We live
by the Word and prayer the same way we live by inhaling and
exhaling air. This is our life.

Devote Yourselves to Prayer

Now back to Colossians 4:2, "Devote yourselves to prayer." This
does not come as a surprise now, does it? If prayer is so great and
central to God's purpose for the universe and for your life, it is
not surprising that God would tell us, "Devote yourselves to
prayer." And it is not surprising that this word "be devoted to" or
"persevere in" or "continue in" occurs six times in the New
Testament in relation to prayer. Acts 1:14, "These all with one
mind were continually devoting themselves to prayer." Acts 2:42,
"[The early church] were continually devoting themselves to . . .
prayer." Acts 6:4, the apostles said they would devote themselves
"to prayer and to the ministry of the word." Romans 12:12, "Rejoice
in hope, persevere in tribulation, be devoted to prayer." Ephesians
6:18, "Pray at all times in the Spirit . . . with all
perseverance."

What does this mean? You pray often and you pray regularly.
Prayer is not infrequent and prayer is not hit and miss. Being
"devoted to" prayer means that you are not haphazard and you are
not forgetful. It means you take steps to see that it is part of
your regular life, the same way eating and sleeping are.

I say, "You take steps," because I think that is implied in the
next words in Colossians 4:2, "Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping
alert in it." Keeping alert means that you work against
distractions and hindrances. You do what you have to do to stay
awake and to stay at the task. For example, Oswald J. Smith, the
former pastor of Peoples Church in Toronto, used to get off his
knees when he got sleepy and pace his room so that he would stay
awake for prayer. Gordon Hamilton, a music partner with him in his
travels, said that he would hear him "pacing back and forth in
prayer." "He must have walked for miles."2

But if it means do what you have to do to stay awake and alert
in praying, it also implies: do
what you have to do to see that you
pray. So let's take the rest of our time with some practical points
about how to be devoted to prayer.

First let's put the same questions we did last week: When,
where and how.

Taking Steps for Prayer: When and Where?

When are you going to pray? You may say, "I don't want a
compartmentalized life with prayer in one devotional compartment
and the rest of my life in other compartments. I want an integrated
life with prayer saturating all I do." Well, amen to that. But it's
a false dichotomy, and it won't work to choose between a season of
prayer in solitude and prayer soaking the rest of your life, as
though those were alternatives. If you want to walk in prayer all
day long, you will need to linger in prayer in times of quiet
communion with God.

Why? Because you can't get deep with God on the run, fitting him
into the cracks of your day. But you can enjoy continual fellowship
with God on the run if you have gone deep with God in the stillness
of the season of prayer. So yes, by all means make it your aim to
have your whole day a walking conversation with God - his memorized
Word feeding you all day, and your desires being offered up to him
hour by hour. Make that your aim. And the way to "be devoted" to
prayer like that is to be devoted to regular daily times of
solitude in prayer. You will go deep with him in the moments of
quiet focus, and this depth will make God real and weighty in the
rest of the day.

So decide on a place and a time for this meeting with God in
prayer.

Taking Steps: How Long?

How long? If you are doing nothing, do something. Start where
you are and take a step. Then ask God to grow you into a deep and
wise and fruitful person. We need Christian sages. And nobody
becomes a sage on the run. There must be lingering in the presence
of God with focused meditation on the Word and focused prayer.

It doesn't have to be one long time. It can be several planned
shorter times. For example, there is the great example of Daniel.
He was a high ranking political official in Babylon. He had enemies
and they passed a law that no one could pray except to the king.
Daniel 6:10 says, "Now when Daniel knew that the document was
signed, he entered his house (now in his roof chamber he had
windows open toward Jerusalem); and he continued kneeling on his
knees three times a day, praying and giving thanks before his God,
as he had been doing previously."

So not only do we see the courage and utter commitment of Daniel
to pray in an open window when his life was threatened for it, but
we see that he was "devoted" to it three times a day. I have found
it very helpful at times in my life to set aside a time in the
morning, at lunch and before or after supper. You go away by
yourself and you read a small portion of Scripture and you pray and
ask for God's help in that next third of the day.

Or you might do it differently. For example, Psalm 119:164 says,
"Seven times a day I praise You, because of Your righteous
ordinances." With alarm watches, you can set yourself any kind of
prayer schedule. But don't do nothing. Devote yourself to prayer.
Be alert in it, and do whatever you have to do to see that you meet
God in a focused way to hear from him in his Word and to offer up
your desires to him in prayer.

Taking Steps: How?

How? Dozens of things could be said. I will mention three.

First, consider praying in concentric circles from your own soul
outward to the whole world. This is my regular practice. I pray for
my own soul first. Not because I am more deserving than others, but
because if God doesn't awaken and strengthen and humble and fill my
own soul, then I can't pray for anybody else's. So I plead with the
Lord every morning for my own soul's perseverance and purification
and power.

Then I go to the next concentric circle, my family, and I pray
for each of them by name: Noel, Karsten/Shelly/Millie, Benjamin,
Abraham, Barnabas, Talitha and some of my extended family.

Then I go to the next concentric circle, the staff and elders of
Bethlehem. I name them all by name.

Then I pray for you, Bethlehem Baptist Church. And then I go out
from there to different concerns and groups at different times: our
missionaries, our denomination and its schools, the Baptist General
Conference, Evangelicalism in general and the church around the
world, especially the suffering church. The wider circles include
the city and the state and the nation and the cultural and social
issues of the world.

You can't pray for everything every time. So there need to be
differences. And your heart will dictate much of your burden. Some
days one family member or one staff member or one crisis in the
church or the world will consume most of your time. But if you have
a pattern - like the concentric circles - you won't spin your
wheels wondering where to start.

That's the first thing I would say in answer to the how
question.

The other is to pray Scripture. The prayer time and the Bible
meditation time don't have to be separate times. It would be best
if they were not separate.

If you ask, What do I pray for myself and my family and my
church and the missionaries and the city and the nations, the
answer is pray Scripture. God's Word reveals God and his will. What
you want for yourself and those you pray for is more of God and
more of his will. As you see him in his Word, pray that God would
make this seen and known and loved in the lives of the people you
pray for. And as you see his will, pray that God would cause it to
be done in the lives of those you pray for. "Thy will be done on
earth as in heaven."

Be intentional about this, but don't be too self-conscious.
Contrived prayers seem inauthentic. If we are so self-conscious
that we try to craft our prayers with interesting turns of phrase,
we will lose the power and reality of prayer. But do try to pray
specific Biblical values for people, not worn out cliches and trite
generalities that have no spiritual depth.

For example, if you want to pray for somebody, pray the
beatitudes: Father, grant that John would recognize his poverty of
spirit. Let him mourn for his sins and not be indifferent or
unconcerned for his own soul. Work a meekness into his heart. Grant
him to be hungry and thirsty for righteousness. Give him the heart
of a peacemaker and a reconciler. Make him pure and keep him pure,
O Lord. And if you will for him to be persecuted, give him grace to
count it all joy and to remember that his reward is great in
heaven.

Praying like this will be mighty in the Spirit, because it is
the Spirit's own Word and the Spirit's own will that you are
praying.

The third thing I would say about how to pray is that praying in
groups is important to build into your life. Families, pray
together. Small groups, pray together. Ministry groups, pray
together. And consider being a part of the seven half-hour prayer
gatherings that happen here at the church each week. Monday, 7:00
AM, Tuesday, 6:30 AM, Wednesday 6:30 AM (women), 5:45 PM, Thursday,
6:30 AM (refugee ministry focus), Friday, 6:30 AM, Sunday 8:15
AM.

So practically, if you followed through last week with your plan
to find a place and time and method of reading the Bible, then add
this: "Be devoted to prayer, keeping alert in it," this will link
you more fully with God and his purpose for the universe.