The Bible continually flags prayer as important and powerful and central to our relationship with God, yet it’s something that’s easy to overlook.
We can be great organisers of activities, distributing leaflets, sharing messages on social media, making sure there are custard creams and tea bags at the ready, and ensuring the sound system is ready. But we are missing something vital if we don’t focus on talking with God. He may want us to change our plans!
The apostle Paul strikes me as a particularly good organiser – after all, he was a powerhouse of first century evangelism, while also running his own small business making tents. But I suspect we wouldn’t be reading about him today if he hadn’t spent lots of time in prayer.
Before Paul converted to Christianity, the early church had developed a routine that involved what they believed as important. Acts 2 says:
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.
The in Acts 6, the disciples say that they will “devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word”.
In this group, there’s lots of people who’ve known Jesus well, who’ve seen him nailed to the cross, who’ve seen him rise from the dead, and who’ve seen him ascend into heaven. You can imagine that these people are having very full-on prayer lives. They’re not going through the motions: they mean it when they pray.
So writing from jail to a group of believers in modern-day Turkey, Paul encourages his readers to pray. He says in Colossians 4 (CSB):
Devote yourselves to prayer; stay alert in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us that God may open a door to us for the word, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains, so that I may make it known as I should.
Paul is not saying to the Colossians: I’m an amazingly persuasive preacher who, through sheer skill and talent and force of personality, am going to convert the masses to Christianity. His mindset is completely different. He is reliant on God.
Elsewhere, in 1 Corinthians 16, he says that “a great door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many who oppose me”. This highlights what life for Paul is really like: God is giving him opportunities to spread the gospel while all the time he faces opposition that, without God’s encouragement, might break him.