Healthy Church = Healthy Prayers

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INTRODUCTION: How many of you have prayed today? We pray for all sorts of reasons. When we’ve done something wrong, we may unburden our conscience by confessing our sin to God. When we’re grateful for some blessing, we may offer up a prayer of thanksgiving. When we’re contemplating God’s work in creation, we may offer up a prayer of worship or adoration. But one reason that almost all of us pray is to ask God for something. Granted, we may often do this selfishly, or foolishly, or with all manner of wrong motives. But the thing itself, our making requests of God, is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. Indeed, when Jesus taught his disciples among other things the importance of prayer. (Koffarnus and I on prayer)

How we relate to God in our prayer lives goes a long way in determining how healthy we are as a congregation. God has called us to do many things as Christians besides praying, but we shouldn’t do any of those things UNTILL we pray. Healthy prayers, the ones that please God the most, aren’t just local self sustaining prayers, but ones that extend around the globe. For people that we don’t know and may never know. These prayers are healthy prayers because they take us outside of ourselves and outside of our comfort zone; they focus on the heartbeat of God, which is nothing less than complete reconciliation between God and every man.

BACKGROUND: There is an interesting cycle at work here in our text. Healthy prayers are prayed by a healthy congregation, and by their nature members of healthy congregations pray for their own needs and the needs of each other. They must do so in order to be a healthy congregation. But they don’t stop there. They pray for the reached and unreached around the world.

PROPOSITION: Paul here gives us compelling testimony of the importance of prayer in the life of the church, the answer to the question… “Why pray?” is embedded in our text.

TRANSITION:

I. WE ARE TO BE CONCERNED FOR ALL PEOPLE (2:1-2)

a. Scripture teaches we are to everyone

• Paul uses the term “urge” when speaking to Timothy about this concept

• He is saying “when the Church at Ephesus, which you serve, comes together for worship prayer needs to play a part” it is IMPORTANT!

• The types of prayer that Paul is talking about is explained by four synonyms, and yes there are different types of prayer

•(1) Entreaties – this is typically the most common type of prayer

• This speaks of a request to God that certain needs need met

• This being done in full awareness of our complete dependence on God

• An example would be praying for someone with an illness of injury

• (2) Prayers

• This world speaks of prayer to God for needs that are always present

• This in contrast to the former which involve specific situations

• An example would be things like wisdom, strength, guidance, justice etc.

• (3)Petitions

• This speaks of pleading on behalf of others, this is intercessory prayer

• Either for or against someone or something (“Bound4Life”)

• Abraham & Sodom (Genesis 18) – Jesus & Peter (Luke 22)

•(4) Thanksgiving

• This is unfortunately one of the most overlooked areas of prayer

• It speaks of gratitude given to God for blessings that have come from Him

• Some of these blessings may well be the answer to recent entreaties and prayers, and petitions
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