Pray for Others

eDevotion

Encouragement for your daily walk with God 

There is an often overlooked solution for the self-centered Christ follower: Look beyond your own problems, see the greater problems others face, and pray for them. It follows the same principal of the hymn, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.” One line says, “And the things of earth will grow strangely dim…” When we focus on the greater, other things pale in significance. 

It’s one reason why we should pray in the Spirit. What I mean by that is, to pray in harmony with the Spirit. Another way to say it is to pray according to the will of God [see 1 John 5:14]. In the same way the Holy Spirit intercedes for you, you intercede for others. 

Doing this may not be as easy as it sounds because we live in an culture that promotes self-centeredness rather than shunning it. However, God wants you to look beyond your own problems and pray for the needs of others. Listen to Paul as he explained it to the Philippian Christ followers, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” [2:3-4]. 

Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, "Before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, in Barcelona, Madrid and other places, there were psychological clinics with large numbers of neurotics undergoing drug treatments and others attending regularly for psychoanalysis and such like. They had their personal problems, their worries, their anxieties, their temptations, having to go back week after week, month after month, to the clinics in order to be kept going.

"Then came the Civil War; and one of the first and most striking effects of that War was that it virtually emptied the psychological and psychiatric clinics. These neurotic people were suddenly cured by a greater anxiety, the anxiety about their whole position, whether their homes would still be there, whether their husbands would still be alive, whether their children would be killed.

"Their greater anxieties got rid of the lesser ones. In having to give attention to the bigger problem they forgot their own personal and somewhat petty problems" (The Christian Soldier: An Exposition of Ephesians 6:10 to 20, p. 357).

Amen to that!

Pray in the Spirit at all times and on every occasion. Stay alert and be persistent in your prayers for all believers everywhere. Ephesians 6:18