Day Seventeen: What is the priority of your prayer life?
Scripture: Philippians 1:9-11
Principle: Put the gospel first.
What do you pray for? What you pray for is just as important as who you pray for and both will reveal your priorities.
The Apostle Paul often includes a prayer in his letters and a study of these prayers will show his priority and be an example for us today. In Philippians, the “who” of Paul’s prayer is “the saints in Christ”. The “what” of his prayer is in verses 9-11. He prays “that their love would grow more and more”. The kind of love he desires for them is not just an emotional love. It is a multi-dimensional love which includes emotion, but also knowledge and judgment.
D.A. Carson says,
“His assumption, evidently, is that you really cannot grow in your knowledge of God if you are full of bitterness or other self-centered sins. There is a moral element in knowing God. Of course, a person might memorize Scripture or teach Sunday School somewhere or earn a degree in theology …, but that is not necessarily the same thing as growing in the knowledge of God and gaining insight into his ways. Such growth requires repentance; it demands a lessening of our characteristic self-focus. To put it positively, it demands an increase in our love, our love for God and our love for others.”34
Paul then he gives the motivation of why he prays for what he prays. His priority is the advancement of the gospel in their lives. He wants them to be pure and holy when Christ returns. He wants the harvest of righteousness to be bountiful. He could have prayed a lot of things for the believers in Philippi. He could have prayed for their health, their prosperity, their comfort, traveling mercies or any number of other things. But because Paul’s priority is the gospel, he prayed that it would continue its work in transforming them.
The gospel was also Jesus’ priority and it shows in his prayers. In John 17, Jesus prays “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” (John 17:17, ESV) When the gospel becomes our priority, it changes who and what we pray for. Instead of just praying for ourselves or those closest to us, we pray for everyone. Instead of spending most of our prayer time asking for temporal needs and wants, we pray for the advancement of the Gospel in the world and in the saints.
Application: Make the gospel the priority of your prayer life. Use Paul’s prayer in Philippians as a guide and pray that the love of the saints in Christ at Emmanuel and other churches would abound more and more with knowledge and discernment.
34D. A. Carson, Basics for Believers: An Exposition of Philippians (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996), 20–21.