The Heart Of God’s Will

The Heart of God’s Will

I have not stopped thanking God for you. I pray for you constantly. Ephesians 1:16

ONE OF THE BEST WAYS to invest your life and relationship with God in the lives of others is to pray for them with faith and power. For anyone who has ever longed to bear fruit for God’s Kingdom but not known how, that’s good news. You don’t need to have a degree or be in a vocational ministry; you don’t even need to ask anyone’s permission. The only requirement is a heart that loves, believes, and asks. You can change the world—or more accurately, God can change the world through you—right where you are.

There are some things you can do, however, to position yourself for that kind of influence. First, you may need to change your mindset on prayer—to recognize that it’s more than a wish, more than a blind effort to hit the target of God’s will, and more than a day or two of trying. It’s an ongoing spiritual, emotional, mental investment in the lives of those you pray for, rooted in gratitude and accompanied with confident hope and expectation. Second, you’ll need to have some specific requests. Sometimes those specifics will be obvious, but other times they won’t. And even though God does not expect you to pray with omniscience about people’s hearts and needs, he does expect your requests to fit the broad parameters of his purposes.

For that, you can’t go wrong with the apostolic prayers in New Testament letters. They capture the heart of God for his people brilliantly. If you ever wonder how to pray for the people in your life, begin there. Paul’s prayers in Ephesians 1:17-20 and 3:16-19, for example, call upon God to fill them with wisdom, revelation, the light of his truth, and the fullness of his presence, and to root them in the unfathomable love of Christ and the power of his resurrection. You can hardly pray anything greater than this, and you’ll never need to tack an “if it’s your will, Lord,” to the end of it. These are life-changing requests, and they eventually bring lasting fruit. Pray them earnestly and see what God does.

The Word of God represents all the possibilities of God at the disposal of true prayer.