SEEKING THE BEST FOR OTHERS

Seeking the Best for Others


One thing I discovered early on in prayer is how quickly I become bored praying for others. I mean, after I've said, "Bless my brother-in-law," for two weeks running, what then? This gets pretty monotonous pretty quickly. How exactly should I pray for him? How do I determine what he most needs without butting into his personal life?

Well, I find a classic prayer and use it as a guide, like those found in the letters of the apostle Paul. When I figured out how to use such a prayer, it recharged my interest in praying for others. Perhaps it will do the same for you.

Beyond Daily Bread

Paul was the most influential Christian in the early years of the church. He founded churches throughout Asia Minor (what today we call Turkey) and in Greece, and he had relationships all over the Mediterranean world.

In his letters to his friends, Paul usually told them how exactly he was praying for them and in some letters he actually prayed for them. These prayers can teach us a lot about how to pray for others more fully.


Our natural tendency is to begin with the concrete, such as praying for health and for success in endeavors: "Lord, help John get over his flu rapidly, and help him do a good job at his presentation tomorrow." That sort of thing. We might add requests for peace or freedom from worry.

Paul's prayers take us to a new level: He is concerned mostly for the spiritual welfare of his friends, and all his prayers are directed to that end. You'll never hear Paul tell his friends that he's praying for their health.

This isn't because Paul despised such prayers. Having been raised in a Jewish environment, there's little doubt that very concrete prayers for concrete blessings were a normal element of his prayers. But in his letters, he wants his readers to realize that he is also praying for them on a different level: for their spiritual needs.

That's all well and good for a spiritual giant like Paul, but can we do the same? To some people, this is presumptuous: "What gives us the right to tell someone else how to run their spiritual lives? That's an individual decision and a matter of privacy."

I won't get into that here other than to say: No, we shouldn't try to tell people how to run their spiritual lives though I think it's okay to ask God to do that. Furthermore, a person's spiritual life may be private, but that doesn't mean that it's not our business. My brother-in-law's finances, for example, are none of my business, but I still want him to use his money wisely and to stay solvent.

Such is the nature of praying for others' spiritual lives: We're not trying to make them become like us, or whomever. We just want what's best for them in God's mind which is why we're asking him in the first place.

In particular, let's look at one of Paul's prayers for the people of Ephesus (on the west coast of modern Turkey), a group he lived with for a time. In this prayer (Ephesians 1:1523), we see four key themes that can become a part of our prayer for others.


Thankfulness

Paul starts on a characteristic note: "I have never stopped thanking God for you. . . ." Paul was one thankful person, and one of the things he is most thankful for is his friends.

To friends in Philippi, he wrote, "Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God" (Philippians 1:3). To friends in Colosse, he says, "We always pray for you, and we give thanks to God . . ." (Colossians 1:3). Even to new acquaintances in Thessalonica (whom he had known for only two weeks), he says, "We always thank God for all of you and pray for you constantly" (1 Thessalonians 1:2).


This is not how we usually think of our friends. Friends are people to worry about, or to fix, or to use, or to help. But here we see a whole new approach: We can thank God for friends and not just at Thanksgiving.

For me, probably the biggest temptation in prayer is to try to "fix" my loved ones. I see a problem she worries too much; he needs more patience; she needs to be more sensitive; whatever and I pray for that, hoping that God will fix the person in that way.


I don't doubt that people need fixing, and it's certainly appropriate to pray such prayers. But before we start trying to make people better, we are wise to thank God for people as they already are. This prevents us from making friends into projects, or from being perpetually dissatisfied with them a special temptation of spouses and parents, as I can attest.

This habit beginning with thanks will, more than anything else, transform your prayers for others. Even when you have no idea how to pray for them, you can certainly thank God for them. And many days, that's enough.

Knowledge

When Paul moves from thanksgiving into requests, his first request is this: He wants God, he tells his friends, "to give you spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you might grow in your knowledge of God" (Ephesians 1:17).


If we need wisdom, so do our friends in both the big decisions (school, marriage, moves, and jobs) and in the daily ones (how we use our time day by day). But Paul is thinking a bit more than this: He prays for "spiritual wisdom and understanding." He wants his friends not just to be healthy, wise, and successful, but also to grow in their knowledge of God.

Is there any more important prayer than this? And yet, if you're like me, it's a request I rarely make. I, too, readily assume that either loved ones are pursuing that already or that they really don't care about spiritual things, so why bother? But no matter their current spiritual state: They will have more joyful and meaningful lives if they get to know God better.

Hope

Another surprising request of Paul's is the next one: "I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so you can understand the wonderful future. . . . I want you to realize what a rich and glorious inheritance he has given to his people" (Ephesians 1:18).

Paul isn't talking about a promotion at work or a new political administration. He's talking about ultimate things: the hope of heaven.

Here again, I find my prayers shortsighted. I'm constantly aiming for the here and now. But life is so fragile that we all need to have our hope pinned on something beyond this world, on something even more real than this present existence. To pray that friends will experience such hope, that they'll have confidence in God in their most frightening and despairing moments, ranks right up there in importance with Paul's first request.

Power

Lest this whole business remain in the spiritual stratosphere, Paul adds one more request: "I pray that you will understand the incredible greatness of his power for us who believe in him" (Ephesians 1:19).

First, let's get a handle on this power: It is the power that created the world. It's the power that redeemed Israel from Egypt. It's the power that raised Christ from the dead. We're talking power.


Second, let's note that Paul assumes that something of this power is available to people like us and to our friends.

Third, let's note that without this power being available to us, everything Jesus taught and Paul reiterated including all this stuff about prayer would be a big lie. It is not a new way of looking at things, not a new state of mind, not some helpful tips to make life easier: The radical promise of the Christian message is that people can be given a power, a strength, and an ability to actually move forward and upward in life. And this is nothing less than God's power working within us.

This amazing fact God in us is something we can pray about. The implication is that if we don't pray about it, the power will not be as available to us. If we do pray about it, for us and for our friends, we will experience it more and more.

One area in my life in which I've discerned God's power is my temper. In my younger days, it didn't take much to make me angry: misplacing my glasses, walking into a messy kitchen, arriving late. Over the years I've prayed about this, as have friends for me.

I'd say I'm now better at controlling my outbursts when I'm angry, but I chalk that up mostly to my own will power. Where I think God has changed me is in getting angry in the first place. Over time, I have found myself unperturbed by situations that would have formerly incited an internal riot.

I remember one day sitting in a traffic jamat one time a surefire rage producer and feeling pretty much at peace. I was surprised at my reaction, but also pleased. I couldn't take much credit for it because I simply hadn't actually tried to feel calm. I knew I didn't have the power to do that. Instead, it was a gift, I believe from Godhis power was working in my warped personality!

How Exactly to Use This Stuff

I am not able to pray Paul's prayer as I do the Psalms. For one thing, it's not as poetic. For another, Paul tends to like run-on sentences, which make me gasp for air by the end.

Nor do I find it helpful each day to pray all four requests as modeled here. Frankly, the ideas are too rich to be expressed sincerely all at once.

Instead, I'd suggest that you take one of these ideas and run with it for a day or a week (depending on how you go about praying for others). For example, I might go down my prayer list like this:

"Lord, I pray for John, that he might grow in spiritual wisdom and in knowledge of you. I pray for Elizabeth, that she might grow in spiritual wisdom and in knowledge of you." And so on. When I repeat the same words in the same way for each person, I find that the words sink deeper into me, and then I can pray them ever more sincerely.

When such a routine threatens to become monotonous, I'll pray for groups of people, whole families, before I repeat the phrase: "Lord, I pray for John and Elizabeth, and their children Joanna, Michael, and Stephen, that they might grow in spiritual wisdom. . . ."

As I mention each name, I try to picture the person, and I also try to picture God doing something for them that will make them happy. This checks my tendency to pray only that people will be fixed according to my desires, but instead that they will be blessed by God in a way that will truly make them happy.


Other Gold Mines of Prayer

If this is a practice you find you enjoy, you're not limited to the language and ideas of this prayer. You might want to mediate on some of Paul's other prayers, including these:

Ephesians 3:1421Philippians 1:311Colossians 1:314

Or, you might simply pick a phrase from one of Paul's letters, or even a saying of Jesus', and use that as the key phrase by which you pray for others. Here are some phrases that immediately come to mind:


''Lord, help Steven to become purer in heart, that he might see more and more of you." Based on Matthew 5:8, though you could do this with any of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:310).

"Lord, help Kathryn to love you with her whole mind, her whole heart, her entire soul, and with all her strength." Based on Luke 10:27.

"Lord, help Monica know that only faith, hope, and love endure, and that the greatest of these is love." Based on 1 Corinthians 13:13.

You get the idea. It's another reason the Bible is the book of prayer: Its resources are nearly infinite.