The Loving Act of Intercessory Prayer
Philippians 1:1-11
St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
Juvenal Cervantes, Pastor
July 10, 2022
“I’ll pray for you.” “I’ll be praying for you.” “You’ll be in my prayers.” I wonder how many times you’ve used words like that this week. If you’re a pastor, you may have done this one hundred times. But all of us are constantly responding to people in our lives by promising to pray in one way or another. Sometimes we actually do that and sometimes we don’t.
I’m reminded how often “I’ll pray for you” has become a religious cliché that sometimes I have thrown out to people in need. That’s what you’re supposed to say. Sometimes people will say, “Will you pray for me” and you’re not going to, I mean, what do you say? “Yes, I will.” It would be awkward to denying it, but often no prayer follows. If we were more honest, we might look in their eyes and say, “Probably not.” I found that it is often useful when someone asks you to pray for them to say, “Yes,” and stop and pray right then and that would keep your promise at that point.
A few years ago there was another awful mass shooting in California where fourteen people were killed and the New York Daily News ran a cover story a few days later that said, “God isn’t fixing this.” It was a sarcastic article mocking the tweets of Christian politicians who were sending their thoughts and prayers to people in California. Our world often hears this “I’ll pray for you,” “I’m sending my prayers” and as they hear this it is religious cliché, mostly empty words.
What does it mean to pray for someone else? How does that work? How do you do it authentically? How many promises of prayer do you need on your petition before God will respond to the thing you want done? Surely praying for one another is more than getting names on a petition, isn’t it?
If you Google “I’ll pray for you” you’ll find some interesting stories. I’m not a country music loving fan, so I did not anticipate encountering country music singer Jaron Lowenstein and his song “Pray for You.” When I saw the link to the video I thought it might be a Christian country western song about praying for people and intercessory prayer so I clicked on it and I was a little surprised by the lyrics.
Now it’s a sad song as many country western songs are. The lyrics are about a man who decides to go to church, he had not been in church a long time and his life is a mess surprisingly, he had his heart broken by his lover and he is angry, and the preacher preached a sermon that day about loving everybody and about not hating or condemning those who wronged you, but to pray for them and let the good lord do his job so he decided he would take the high road and pray for his ex.
Here’s the chorus:
I pray your breaks go out running down the hill. I pray a flower pot fall from a window seal and knocks you on the head like I’d like to.
I pray your birthday comes and nobody calls.
I pray you’re flying high when your engine stalls.
I pray all your dreams never comes true, just wherever you are, honey, I pray for you.
I think he missed the point.
I can’t claim to understand how intercessory prayer works. How it is someone praying for me or me praying for someone else involves God in that situation. I can’t explain it, but I can’t deny that biblically there is a consistent call for us to pray for each other, it’s in there throughout scriptures and there are examples of one story after another of one person praying for another.
Abraham praying for Sodom and Gomorrah or Moses praying for the people in Israel, David praying for his people, it run all the way through, even through Jesus praying for us in John 17. There are a lot of examples and I cannot deny that, and I can’t deny the strong compulsion I feel to pray for others, particularly for others that I love. We feel compelled to do that and we find some peace to know that others are praying for us as well. Even as I can’t explain intercessory prayer, I can’t deny it either, it’s present in Scripture.
I think what I need and what you need is a teacher, someone who can help us understand how to do this better. How do we pray for those that we care about?
Paul and his companions visited the city of Philippi on his second missionary journey while he was bearing witness to people throughout Asia minor and through Greece. A church was planted in Philippi in the midst of much opposition and over time that particular congregation seemed to come a group of Paul dearest friends. He interacted with time. He visited them again on his third missionary journey and he was arrested, taken to Caesarea and ultimately in Rome. And while he was in jail in Rome, they sent gifts to him by way of a church leader named Epaphroditus. And when Epaphroditus got there to Paul prison cell, he also brought news that the church was struggling with a sense of unity, kind of a beginning rift, opening up, a crack in the fellowship. And Epaphroditus became ill, he had to stay awhile before he could return home. So when he was ready to go back to Macedonia, back to Philippi, Paul wrote this little short letter called Philippians to send to the church and to address all kind of things, to let them know how he was doing, a missionary report to say thank you because they were concerned for him, to thank them for the financial gift they sent to help support him and also to address however subtly, the need for unity in that congregation, and affection and humility and service and mutual love.
His letter to the Philippian church is kind of a love letter, it really is, he reminds them of Christ’s sacrificial love for them and calls them for that same king of sacrificial love for each other.
And here’s how he opens the letter and I want to invited you to read this aloud with me, read God’s word together.
Philippians 1:1-11
Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,
To all God’s holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons[a]:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart and, whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me. God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.
And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.
If we want to learn to pray, Paul may be one of our best teachers. He opens all his letters with a word of prayer, specifically to the congregation he is addressing and here you listen in and hear in Paul’s prayer Paul’s deep affection for these people.
“I thank God every time I think of you,” verse 3.
“I always pray for you with joy” verse 4. “We’ve been partners in the gospel from the first day till now. I’m confident of God’s work among you. It’s right for me to think of you all in this way. You have me in your heart. They have supported and shared god’s grace in his ministry and imprisonment and he longs for them with the compassion of Christ Jesus. You hear of that affection just dripping in that opening word, he cares for these people. And that affection that flows from Paul and his friends in Philippi is a source a good bit of Paul’s joy even in circumstances like a roman imprisonment.
This love letter opens with one of the greatest expressions of love available to anyone of us to share with each other. The loving act of intercessory prayer, praying for those who we can about as he says he “always prays for them with joy.” Paul who loves them so dearly, prays for them so deeply. And the opening verse is a great place for us to learn how to pray for others, especially for those who are dear to us. Some of us sitting in the same room with you this morning.
When Paul says, “I pray for you,” he says this with several assumptions that we ought to be clear about and we best not ignore when we pray for those that we love.
One of the things that Paul assumes as he prays is that the whole life of the person he is praying for matters to God, body and spirit, body and character, inside and out.
And he prays for both, in fact for Paul it is far more important to pray for their character and the way that God is working to shape them into Christ likeness than it is to pray for their comfort. Both matter to God and he keeps that in mind when he prays for people.
A second assumption is that God works in people’s lives to accomplish his purposes.
And prayer is somehow involved in that as an instruments where we can explain that or not, so that Paul can continue the work that he’s been involved in, with God, working in the lives of the people in Philippi, even though the is hundreds of miles away in a Roman cell. His connection for them is his prayer for them and he believes that God is at work in their lives and in their lives together to bring it to completion to the day of Christ. He prays for them to continue to participate with them with God in that work.
The third assumption is that he’s persuaded that God can do more in their lives that we can imagine and our prayers need to stretch to that possibility.
In Ephesians is that often stated statement of Paul, “Now to him who is able to do a far abundantly more than we are able to think, imagine, or ask.” That’s how Paul thinks, God can do far more than what we can imagine and our prayers need to stretch to a God who encompasses that. Those are some of his assumptions. So if we want to pray well for those who we love, how might we proceed if Paul is our teacher?
One is to pray far more than their physical needs.
It is not wrong to pray for their physical needs, often that’s what generates prayer request in the first place. I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember anyone asking me, “Pastor, would you pray for their character.”
They want prayer for their children, they want prayer for their spouses, they want prayer for their jobs, they want prayer for all these physical things in this world and that fine because those are the needs that we have in our lives, but for Paul it is, “Don’t stop there. Don’t be limited to the physical needs of those who you pray for. Pray for the kind of persons they are becoming. We pray for other’s burdens to be lifted and Paul prays often that they may have stronger backs. We pray for relationships to be easy and simple and Paul prays for love to abound, for us to learn to love those who are hard to love. We pray for blessings, meaning physical wellbeing and happiness and Paul prays for his friends here to be able to choose what is right and what is best so that their lives might be pure and blameless by the day of Christ, that they might bear an abundant harvest of the fruit of righteousness for the glory of God, that’s a different kind of prayer than we often pray.
When people say, “Pray for me,” it needs to flip a little switch that says, “Yes, I’ll pray about this, but I’ll pray for a little bit more because God has a care and concern for your whole life, not just for your comfort and your physical well-being. Paul dearly loves these people so when he prays for them he takes into account more than their comfort than the object of the prayer. Out of affection, he prays for their character. He wants them to be the kind of people that God wants for them to be.
Our model in praying this way is not just Paul, it’s also the Holy Spirit. Romans chapter eight has this puzzling verse.
Romans 8:26-27
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
I don’t understand that, but the promise is that when we don’t know how to pray, when our words are mumbling and stumbling or just silent because we don’t know that to ask that doesn’t mean no prayer is taking place. The one who is closer than the air we breathe is prayer for us, taking what we truly need and interpreting that to God so that our needs are being expressed for God the Father. That’s the promise there and it’s not just the Spirit, Jesus himself, the risen Lord, the ascended Christ.
Romans 8:34
Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.
Jesus is praying for us. Our needs are being translated in the presence of God by the Holy Spirit who surround us, by Jesus who died for us. He prays for more than our physical wellbeing.
When God’s spirit or God’s son intercedes for us with the Father, it’s with full knowledge of what we most deeply need and what God passionately longs for us in our lives. We often don’t know that those things are, we need for someone to pray for us.
I think that helps me think a little bit more clearly when I say, “I will pray for you.” I don’t think it simply says “I’ll pray about you” or “I’ll pray about your prayer request.” It means that I will stand in your place, it means I will pray on your behalf. When you don’t know what to pray, you may need someone to pray for you.
When you don’t think you have enough faith to pray for, you may need someone to pray for you. When you aren’t thinking clearly, wateringly, lovingly about your life and your relationships, you may need someone to pray for you, stand in your place.
I heard about a pastor whose friend asked him to pray for her son who was just making a mess of his life. The pastor was certain that what she was asking was “Pray that he will behave himself, pray that he will straighten up his life, that my life will be less chaotic.” He understood that, because he had a son also. But as he thought of his responsibility to pray for this young man, he said that he would pray as he had good sense. He said, “I would ask for things that a person in a right mind would ask for.” I would pray for those things to be in his life, my role is to step in and for “in his stead,” not just pray about him. What would he pray if he had good sense?
That’s praying for someone, standing in. To say it another way, if we believe, like Paul, that our whole life matters to God inside and out, if we believe that God works to accomplish his purposes in our lives and is able to do things above our imagination and if we believe that somehow prayer has a role in this, we pray for one another. We step in and ask God to make it so.
That’s one thing that we can take from Paul: that we take into account more than our physical need, we need to pray for the whole person.
We also pray that God’s purposes will be completed. Paul’s words in Philippians 1:6 are frequently quoted.
Philippians 1:6
Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
Some translations would render that “I’m confident that he who began the good work in you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ” because if we say “in you” we hear it personally, but the “in you” is plural that’s why it is translated here “among you.”
Paul is confident that God is going to bring this good work to fulfillment. The good work is a corporate work that God has done and he’s praying that the church would be empowered by God’s work among them to become more than God intended it to be by the day of Christ Jesus.
He’s praying for the churches future. He doesn’t pray for ease for the church. HE doesn’t pray that they would be spared from persecution, he prays for a completed work to be done. What ultimately matters for Paul is not his comfort, his release from jail, although he says later that the prayers for the Philippians are going to contribute to his release but he says “Even if I don’t get release, even if God does not answer the prayers, I’m not concerned about my comfort, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”
What ultimately matters is not the Philippians comfort or ease or the freedom from persecution, what matters is that God’s work is completed among them. Verse 11 says “to the glory and praise of God.”
God started something really good in Philippi when Paul was there. Even though Paul was gone, God was continually doing a work there, Paul was simply asking, “Lord, would you bring that work to fulfillment, to completion.”
One hundred and six years ago, God began something really good in Greeley, it’s called “St. John’s United Church of Christ.” In a few months we celebrate our anniversary. And God began that work and he has been faithful to continue that work, but know this: God is not thorough with that work, he is not finished yet, and our prayer, when you pray for your church, pray that God who began the good work among us will bring it to completion by the day of Christ, that God would bring the work to fulfillment. That means that God develop among us love and maturity and discipline and discernment and depth of insight, understanding, and knowledge and sincerity, and integrity and moral purity and transparency, and blamelessness, and being no cause of stumbling to others, and righteousness of character, all those things that Paul talks in this letter, we pray for God to do among us, that God would bring his work to completion by the day of Christ Jesus. God takes the initiative in beginning the work, God engages our lives in the process, and God is the one who brings it to completion, he’s alpha and omega, he’s the beginning and the end, he’s the author and perfector of our faith. We pray for God to fulfill that in the lives we pray for.
Paul may be absent from Philippi, but ultimately is God’s work, not Paul’s work that needs to be completed. He may be absent from Philippi, but prayer allows him to participate still in the lives that he cares about, even from a prison cell and he prays for the glory and praise of God to be magnified in the lives of those he loves. Because God is not absent when Paul is. The things that matter more to Paul can continue because it is a work of God, not a work of Paul and God will bring it to completion.
If your life includes relationship with people whose spiritual growth and their wellbeing are the ultimate concern for you, it matters to you, you can pray with confidence that even though you may be separated from them geographically, by days and hours, God is still at work, taking care of the things that matters most to you. One definition of prayer is a conversation with God about something that is of mutual concern. And when we pray for the spiritual wellbeing of those who we can about we know that it’s a bigger concern of God than it is of ours and we can pray with confidence.
The third thing that Paul can teach us about praying for those we care about and that is when we pray for others is that we need to stretch our prayer for God’s power to act in our lives.
Paul’s prayer for his friends is a great vision he holds about what God is capable of doing in people’s lives. He knows that because of what he’s seen happening in his own life. He is praying for these people in Philippi, Epaphroditus, Lydia and others.
He prays that God’s love abound in people’s lives. We can pray that every one of you would have love that is overflowing with love for each other, you can’t contain it, and as a result you would be able to discern the things that are best. What the right thing to do, the right thing to say, the right way to act, the things that need to be done. That you will be able to discern that because you are able to live with love and knowledge of each other and knowledge of God and as a result of that your knowledge of lives are blameless. People can point to you and say, “It’s your fault that the world is the way it is.”
Blameless, there is nothing to be called into account to and full, transparent, whole, sincere, full of integrity, that’s how he prays, stretches his prayer to imagine real human beings like a jailer in a Roman prison and a woman who is a businesswoman, a formerly demon-possessed girl, he imagines those people lives just overflowing with love and when we pray for one another we need to stretch a little bit and we need to see that.
“Abounding” is one of Paul’s favorite words, it shows up 39 times in the new Testament, 26 of those are in the book of Philippians. It characterizes what Christ has ushered in through his resurrection and the outpouring of the holy Spirit, he ushers in an abundance to overflowing of faith and word and zeal understanding and knowledge, comfort, wisdom, of generosity and all of those things Paul speaks of being overflowing in the lives of his people, and here it is overflowing love.
Paul imagines that we can overcome the selfishness that is so much a part of all of our lives, that’s an inherent part of the human life. God can overcome that self-protected shield we erect around our heart to keep other people out and to keep other people from really knowing us.
God can dissolve the demandingness that we have that seeks to be in control of other people’s lives and has to be in the driving seat at all times and he can replace all those things with an overflowing of Calvary love, of love that looks like the sacrifice of Jesus. That’s why he says in chapter 2 of Philippians, “Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”
As river overflows its banks so is mature love that overflows in people’s lives. God can teach his people to discern his will, to be able to choose what is right in the midst of the world’s confusion. Choosing good over evil, best over good, knowing what is valuable, knowing how to love other people best and focus on their need.
Verse 11: God can fulfill his purposes by changing our lives toward what is right and just, like a tree, covered with fruit, the fruit of righteousness. God can make our lives more and more authentic, the real thing, marked by integrity, he can transform our hearts in such a way, that we can live with each other, in love in this dark world. All this is possible, and when we pray, “God, help Johnny in his test next week” that’s good, pray for Johnny in his text, but when you pray stretch your prayers a bit, think about what God can truly do in Johnny’s life where he is an eight-year-old or eighty-year-old, God is not done with us yet. Bring that work to completion.
How small our prayers often sound compared to Paul. He had such a vision for what a life in Christ could look like and he stretched his prayers toward that vision. It comes down to this: Intercessory prayer is a product of the lives invested in the purposes of God in this world, it’s one piece that binds us and connect us all together as we pray for one another.
We pray for one another because we love, because we care, and the more deeply we pray, the more we learn to pray for the things that matter most.
I’ll pray for you, you’ll be in my prayers, I wonder how the many forms of human need will cross our path just in front of us, we have no way of knowing. I wonder how often we’ll feel compelled to say, “I’ll pray for you.” I wonder if you and I would be able to rid our lives of “I’ll pray for you” as a cheap religious cliché that we toss to people in need. I wonder if we begin to pray for those we love with something that gets to the depths and richness of Paul’s prayer for those who he loved.