What’s on your personal prayer list?
For most of us, our prayer lists include a string of family members and friends, church members and missionaries, and any known major needs of those people.
In addition to these, some people also include the United States President, the persecuted church, and major social issues like abortion, homosexuality, and immigration.
But I will be the first to confess that praying through that first set of requests is easier than praying through that second set. It’s more personal, and it seems more attainable. My mindset tends to say, “I’m praying for my friends and family because God will answer those prayers. I’m praying for the President because I’m supposed to.”
This mindset fails to see the amazing privilege God is calling His people to in prayer: God wants to use our prayers to shape history!
This is just a sampling of the history-shaping prayers God instructs us to pray:
- Pray for the coming of God’s Kingdom: “Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).
- Pray for God to raise up missionaries all over the world: “Pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into the harvest” (Luke 10:2).
- Pray for God’s providential guidance of world leaders for the sake of the salvation of all people: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:1-4).
- Pray for all Christians everywhere: “praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints” (Ephesians 6:18).
The common thread in these prayers is that they are all related to God’s sovereign work of redemptive history. When God created the world, He created it with a plan. He has sovereignly been carrying out that plan from Creation to today. And though He is sovereign and does not need our prayers to accomplish His plan, He is inviting us in! He is extending to us the chance to join Him not only in His work in the lives of those right around us, but in His grand work that encompasses all of history! God’s Kingdom will come, and He invites us to pray for its coming! God will send out laborers into the harvest, and He invites us to pray that He will send them! God does providentially guide world rulers for the sake of the salvation of all people, and He invites us to pray for this providential working! And God will build His Church to completion and the gates of hell shall not overcome it, and He invites us to pray for all the saints who are a part of this Church!
We are invited by God to pray prayers that shape redemptive history! One day, we will be citizens of a Kingdom of righteousness, and we will stand in a great congregation of people from every tribe and tongue and nation, and we will join together and praise the Lamb who was slain for our salvation. And God is using our prayers today to bring us to THAT day.
“And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us” (1 John 5:14).