The year was 1890. The Christian and Missionary Alliance was only three years old. In its first two years of existence nineteen missionaries had been sent out, but it was now August of 1890, and not a single additional missionary had been sent since November of the previous year. A.B. Simpson, the founder of the movement, was worried that the missionary thrust was losing steam rather than gaining it.
So after his closing sermon at the Old Orchard convention that year, Simpson distributed to the assembled members of the Alliance movement a pledge card. He called it a “FAITH PROMISE”. Within three months, more than 2000 Alliance members had made a faith promise.
That faith promise proved to be what was needed to get the movement back on track. By 1893, the C&MA had increased from nineteen to 180 missionaries in ten countries: Congo, Sudan, India, China, Japan, Bulgaria, Palestine, Alaska, Haiti, and Dominican Republic. By 1895, just eight years after the Alliance was formed, there were more than 300 missionaries serving worldwide.
Incredible! But as Paul Harvey would say, “Here’s the rest of the story”. The first faith promise wasn’t for money. It was a promise to pray.
How do we account for the growth of the church from the first century until today? How do we account for the part that the C&MA has been able to play in that growth in the last 100 years? How do we account for the fact that the evangelical church has gone from being practically non-existent in Brazil a century ago to being a Body that may number as many as 20 million today?
Missionaries have gone with the gospel. Believers have sacrificed financially to send those missionaries, but giving and going would have resulted in nothing had it not been for believers who have obeyed the Spirit’s command in Colossians 4:2-4 and have continued steadfastly in prayer.
Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison—that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak.
As someone who has spent nine years in Brazil and participated in reaping the harvest there, I believe God brought this nation to a point of harvest through the prayers of his people. Although there is certainly chaff in the numbers of evangelicals reported for Brazil, one thing is certain--millions of men and women and children have put their faith in Jesus. If you have prayed for Brazil, you were part of this! God has used your prayers to save lost sinners!
Looking at this kind of phenomenal church growth is encouraging. It is like looking down on Brazil from a satellite and seeing the big picture, what God is doing on a grand scale in a country of 177 million people. We can see what God is doing not just through the Alliance, but through all of his people, of many diverse groups, who are preaching the good news of Jesus.
But let me share with you a story on a much smaller scale, from my own ministry, that also shows the importance of intercession. Paul says in v. 3, pray also for us… He knew that for his ministry to succeed, he needed the prayers of God’s people.
When we returned for our second term in Brazil, we decided that we needed to take intercessory prayer much more seriously, so we enlisted over 100 people to be a part of what we call our Epaphras network. We got this name from a verse further down in Colossians 4.
Colossians 4:12 “Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.”
Our primary means of communicating with this network was e-mail, so we actually call these people our E-paphrases (note the hyphen!), people who are willing “to struggle on our behalf” in their prayers. People to whom we can send an email periodically and say as Paul did in v. 3, Pray for us!
Soon after we arrived in Brazil, it became apparent just how much we were going to need these prayers.
When we arrived back in Porto Alegre with our family in 2003, we had high hopes for what God was going to do. Our assignment was to pastor a church plant that was around three years old that had about 30 to 35 people in attendance on Sunday mornings.
We were aware immediately that it wasn’t going to be easy. Due to financial challenges, the church was faced with leaving its rented storefront location on a main avenue. With the upheaval of a change in location, people began to leave the church. Our attempt to bring a Brazilian pastor on the church planting team also was met with resistance by the dwindling congregation.
To make a long story short, by March, 2004, just eight months after I had assumed the pastorate of the church, the congregation had gone from around 35 regular attenders to between 12 and 15 people, and most of these were pretty angry with me, feeling that I had killed their church. And I wasn’t convinced they were wrong!
I went to the field leadership team and told them I could not continue as pastor. My confidence as a church planter was shattered, and I even began to question if I should continue as a missionary.
The leadership team graciously allowed me to shift my responsibility to leading the Bible College extension in our city, and a more experienced missionary took my place as pastor of the church plant. I continued on as his assistant.
At the time I took over the Bible college extension there were around ten students total. Within a year, the number of students went from ten down to four--not much encouragement for an already struggling missionary!
I wish I could tell you that “the prayers of God’s people pulled us through this difficult time”, but I can’t honestly say that, because although we were communicating with our E-paphras network about all of this that was happening, I don’t think we communicated fully the depth of the discouragement that we were feeling. I think we were afraid to say with our whole heart laid bare… “Pray for us!”
But in spite of that, I believe that many of those folks were praying for us. Whenever we would send out an e-mail we would get a few replies, and very, very slowly things started to turn around. For the next two years, although we saw little happening in terms of visible results in our ministry, God was working in my heart and in my wife’s heart.
He started by bringing an amazing renewal in our personal relationship with Him. I watched as the Lord poured out his Spirit on my wife! She came to me one day and shared that she had never in her life experienced so forcefully and tangibly the love of God for her. She said, “what do you make of this?” I said, “God is filling you with his Spirit!” She began getting up and spending hours in Bible reading and prayer. She was so filled with joy, she often would have a song in her heart that the Spirit would give her. When we discussed the Bible together, sometimes she would say things with such insight, that I would just sit there with my mouth open.
God’s work in her life spilled over into mine. I also started getting up super-early to read the Word and pray. At first pridefully, just because I didn’t want to be out-done by her, but then the Lord began to meet me and to break my pride. He humbled me in his presence. I began to have such a hunger for God that at times I thought it would consume me. I felt as if I would die if God did not hear my cries for more of him in my life. During that time, I changed my life verse to Psalm 27:4 One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.
When we arrived home last May, we were in Ohio, visiting family, and one of my wife’s aunts, a godly lady who is one of our Epaphrases, heard my wife describing these experiences and said, “God has burdened me to pray for you this past year almost every day. Now I know what it was for! Praise God for his work in your life.”
By the fourth and final year of our term, an amazing thing happened. I had set aside a half day to pray and seek the Lord and as I was praying, the Lord began to challenge me about my unwillingness to lead a church plant. So during one of my prayer times, I did something that I rarely do, in fact I don’t think I have ever done this before: I asked the Lord for a sign. Specifically, a sign that I was to be involved in church planting.
And the sign that I ended up asking of the Lord was one that for me seemed impossible. I said, “Lord, I need a sign that stretches my faith and that shows me that you are at work within me, and that your power is with me.” And so this is what I asked the Lord for. I said, “Lord Jesus, to plant churches I need to be able to lead people to you. If you will allow me the privilege of leading five individuals to you through my own personal evangelism by the end of this term, I will know that you can use me as a church planter.”
Now for a long time I have been faithful to share my faith with others, but I have never been one to see a lot of fruit from that evangelism. So for me to ask God to give me five conversions was a big step for me. I have never in my life led five people to Christ within the course of a year, and the time remaining in my term when I prayed this was about ten months.
To make a long story short, God answered that prayer in amazing ways. Adriana and Eriley were a couple that moved from the interior of the state to the capital city. They moved into an apartment right next door to the hotel where our church was meeting. We invited them to an evangelistic Bible study in our apartment, and at the conclusion of that study, they followed the Lord Jesus as his disciples.
They were followed by Mateus, a 14 year old boy who also followed Christ. Next in line was Vinicius, a young college student whose sister was already attending our church. Four conversions! Only one more to go, and Mateus’ mother, Marilene was involved in another evangelistic Bible study that was meeting in our home.
Would God grant us the five conversions I had asked for before the end of our term? I had not shared with my E-paphras network the numerical goal, but many people had been praying by name for Adriana, Eriley, Mateus, Vinicius, and Marilene. Over the course of those last months of our term, we received e-mails like these…
One week before we were to leave Brazil for the States, we concluded our final Bible study. Marilene had not yet made a decision to follow Christ. But on the next Sunday, which was Mother’s Day, and the day before we were to get on the plane to leave Brazil, she came to me and said, “I have decided to follow Jesus. I want to be baptized with my son.” Five conversions… exactly what I had asked God for.
Through this miraculous answer to prayer, and through the prayers of many faithful Epaphrases, God had renewed the calling of a discouraged missionary.
But let’s go back to Colossians 4 to see more about who Epaphras was and how he prayed.
Colossians 4:12
“Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God. 13For I bear him witness that he has worked hard for you and for those in Laodicea and in Hierapolis.”
Epaphras was an intercessor. It says here that he “struggled” on behalf of the Colossians in his prayers.
Struggling in Prayer
What does it mean to “struggle” in behalf of someone in your prayers? The greek word used here for "struggle" is used only one other time in Colossians, but in a way that sheds light on Epaphras’ struggle in prayer.
Colossians 1:28-29
“Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works in me.”
What was Epaphras’ struggle in prayer? I believe it was the same struggle that Paul described in this verse: it was a spiritual toil, as the energy and strength of Christ powerfully worked through him in prayer. The fact that he struggled doesn’t mean that prayer was a drudgery for him. It was not the struggle to stay awake, or to know what to pray. It was not the struggle of trying to discipline himself to pray when he would rather be doing other things. His struggle was the exertion of spiritual energy to accomplish the work of God.
The struggle of prayer is when God’s grace is working in us, giving us the spiritual energy to accomplish through our prayer what he desires to do. Picture an olympic weightlifter. He lifts a barbell that you and I wouldn’t be able to budge. What is impossible for us is possible for him because of the strength that is flowing through his muscles. In the same way, what is impossible for us in our flesh, is possible as God’s strength flows through us by his indwelling Spirit.
Paul said in Romans 15:30 “Strive together with me in your prayers to God…” And that is the same challenge that I make to our prayer supporters. Strive together with us in your prayers to God. God’s strength will flow through you as you pray, and will impact eternity as God works powerfully through your prayers.
But let’s look further at what Paul teaches us about prayer in Colossians 4. Even though Epaphras isn’t mentioned until v. 12, I believe that he prayed the way Paul challenged the Colossians to pray in vs. 2-3. Verse 2 begins with this very clear directive: Continue steadfastly in prayer.
Continuing in Prayer
That doesn’t need a whole lot of exegesis to be much clearer. “Continue”: Don’t just pray once and stop. Don’t just pray once in a while. Continue in prayer. And continue “steadfastly” in prayer. Even when it’s difficult. Even when you are tempted not to pray. Even when you don’t feel like praying. Be steadfast in your praying. Even when you aren’t seeing the answers to prayer that you would like to. Don’t give up. Don’t give in. Be steadfast in your prayer. Devote yourselves to prayer (NASB/NIV).
Are you praying that way? Are you willing to pray that way? Are you willing to simply pray today, “Lord, help me to be one who is steadfastly continuing in prayer. Do that in me, Lord.”
Being Watchful in Prayer
Moving along in the text, we are also challenged to “be watchful” in prayer. Other versions say “keeping alert in it”. What do you think it means to “be watchful” in prayer? I meditated on that for a good while and also did a word study to see in what other ways this word “watchful” is used in the NT, and I came to the following conclusion:
In Acts 20, Paul warned the Ephesian elders to be alert for false teachers. To be aware that an individual is a false teacher, you have to be in tune with the Holy Spirit. You have to be able to recognize spiritual error even when everything looks good on the outside.
Finally, in I Peter 5:8 we are warned to be watchful for the devil’s attacks. If you aren’t spiritually vigilant, and aware that Satan is out to trip you up, you’ll be blindsided by him. You can’t see him, but he is there, working to attack you.
So in this same vein, being watchful in prayer is being in tune with the Holy Spirit. It is being aware of what God desires to do in a given situation because you are in touch with him through prayer.
Listen to this amazing e-mail from Debra Blackwell, a C&MA missionary in Guinea, West Africa. In a previous e-mail, she had asked for prayer for a vibrant Christian woman named Umu, whose husband is a devoted muslim.
I got another e-mail while on this tour that also reminded me of being led by the Lord in our prayers. "My brother, God keeps on making me pray for you, I don’t know why. I have also prayed for your wife and sons. You have prayer supporters, one of them is me."
How can we become intercessors who are led by the Holy Spirit in this way as we pray?
First of all, we need to immerse ourselves in the Word of God. God’s Word is our primary source of information about God’s eternal purposes. It is through the Word that we learn his promises, that we understand more and more of his purposes in life and death and relationships and conflict and natural disasters, and everything else that is happening around us in our world.
And then, as we are immersed in the Word, his Spirit will guide us in our praying so that we are praying according to his specific will in each situation. His Spirit will enable us to apply with divine wisdom the revelation of the Word of God to the specific situations that we are praying for. Perhaps the Spirit will remind us of specific scripture promises to pray for specific situations.
So when we are being “watchful in prayer” and we receive a missionary prayer letter, or information about any situation that God leads us to pray for. We will pray in accordance with the will of God as revealed in his Word, as he guides us by his Spirit.
Being thankful in prayer
The third exhortation in verse 2 is that we are to be “thankful in prayer”. I see two different ways that we can put this into practice.
We can thank the Lord for the things that he has already done in answer to our prayers. One of the reasons it is so important for us to keep in contact with the missionaries we pray for is so that we can thank God for the specific things that he is doing. By reading this article, hopefully you now have some things to thank God for that he has done in Brazil.
And a second way that we can be thankful in prayer relates to being watchful in prayer. We can be thankful even as we intercede.
When we are praying for the salvation of a hardened sinner, we can be thankful that God’s power to save is greater than the hardest heart.
When we are praying for Indonesia after a Tsunami has devastated the area, we can be thankful that God will use it for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. We can also be thankful that he is rich in mercy and shows grace to all those refugees who call on him.
When we are praying for the financial resources that we desparately need in the Great Commission Fund. We can thank him that his strength is made perfect in our weakness. We can thank him that the silver is his and the gold is his, as it says in Haggai.
As we continue into vs. 3-4, Paul then narrows the focus to their intercession for his personal ministry as an apostle. He says, “At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison—that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak.”
Paul is saying, “Now I want you to take what I just taught you about prayer in v. 2 and apply it in service to me and my ministry.” And the specific ministry that Paul has in mind is the proclamation of the Gospel, the mystery of Christ. He wants them to pray that he will have opportunity to preach the gospel, and that he will be able to make the gospel message clear.
Brothers and sisters, I am making the same appeal to you that Paul made to the Colossians. Will you pray also for us? Continuing steadfastly. Being watchful. And praying with thanksgiving. Interceding for us, asking that God may open to us a door for the word, and then enabling us to proclaim the gospel message with clarity.
Thank you for being an “Epaphras” for us!
So after his closing sermon at the Old Orchard convention that year, Simpson distributed to the assembled members of the Alliance movement a pledge card. He called it a “FAITH PROMISE”. Within three months, more than 2000 Alliance members had made a faith promise.
That faith promise proved to be what was needed to get the movement back on track. By 1893, the C&MA had increased from nineteen to 180 missionaries in ten countries: Congo, Sudan, India, China, Japan, Bulgaria, Palestine, Alaska, Haiti, and Dominican Republic. By 1895, just eight years after the Alliance was formed, there were more than 300 missionaries serving worldwide.
Incredible! But as Paul Harvey would say, “Here’s the rest of the story”. The first faith promise wasn’t for money. It was a promise to pray.
How do we account for the growth of the church from the first century until today? How do we account for the part that the C&MA has been able to play in that growth in the last 100 years? How do we account for the fact that the evangelical church has gone from being practically non-existent in Brazil a century ago to being a Body that may number as many as 20 million today?
Missionaries have gone with the gospel. Believers have sacrificed financially to send those missionaries, but giving and going would have resulted in nothing had it not been for believers who have obeyed the Spirit’s command in Colossians 4:2-4 and have continued steadfastly in prayer.
Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison—that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak.
As someone who has spent nine years in Brazil and participated in reaping the harvest there, I believe God brought this nation to a point of harvest through the prayers of his people. Although there is certainly chaff in the numbers of evangelicals reported for Brazil, one thing is certain--millions of men and women and children have put their faith in Jesus. If you have prayed for Brazil, you were part of this! God has used your prayers to save lost sinners!
Looking at this kind of phenomenal church growth is encouraging. It is like looking down on Brazil from a satellite and seeing the big picture, what God is doing on a grand scale in a country of 177 million people. We can see what God is doing not just through the Alliance, but through all of his people, of many diverse groups, who are preaching the good news of Jesus.
But let me share with you a story on a much smaller scale, from my own ministry, that also shows the importance of intercession. Paul says in v. 3, pray also for us… He knew that for his ministry to succeed, he needed the prayers of God’s people.
When we returned for our second term in Brazil, we decided that we needed to take intercessory prayer much more seriously, so we enlisted over 100 people to be a part of what we call our Epaphras network. We got this name from a verse further down in Colossians 4.
Colossians 4:12 “Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.”
Our primary means of communicating with this network was e-mail, so we actually call these people our E-paphrases (note the hyphen!), people who are willing “to struggle on our behalf” in their prayers. People to whom we can send an email periodically and say as Paul did in v. 3, Pray for us!
Soon after we arrived in Brazil, it became apparent just how much we were going to need these prayers.
When we arrived back in Porto Alegre with our family in 2003, we had high hopes for what God was going to do. Our assignment was to pastor a church plant that was around three years old that had about 30 to 35 people in attendance on Sunday mornings.
We were aware immediately that it wasn’t going to be easy. Due to financial challenges, the church was faced with leaving its rented storefront location on a main avenue. With the upheaval of a change in location, people began to leave the church. Our attempt to bring a Brazilian pastor on the church planting team also was met with resistance by the dwindling congregation.
To make a long story short, by March, 2004, just eight months after I had assumed the pastorate of the church, the congregation had gone from around 35 regular attenders to between 12 and 15 people, and most of these were pretty angry with me, feeling that I had killed their church. And I wasn’t convinced they were wrong!
I went to the field leadership team and told them I could not continue as pastor. My confidence as a church planter was shattered, and I even began to question if I should continue as a missionary.
The leadership team graciously allowed me to shift my responsibility to leading the Bible College extension in our city, and a more experienced missionary took my place as pastor of the church plant. I continued on as his assistant.
At the time I took over the Bible college extension there were around ten students total. Within a year, the number of students went from ten down to four--not much encouragement for an already struggling missionary!
I wish I could tell you that “the prayers of God’s people pulled us through this difficult time”, but I can’t honestly say that, because although we were communicating with our E-paphras network about all of this that was happening, I don’t think we communicated fully the depth of the discouragement that we were feeling. I think we were afraid to say with our whole heart laid bare… “Pray for us!”
But in spite of that, I believe that many of those folks were praying for us. Whenever we would send out an e-mail we would get a few replies, and very, very slowly things started to turn around. For the next two years, although we saw little happening in terms of visible results in our ministry, God was working in my heart and in my wife’s heart.
He started by bringing an amazing renewal in our personal relationship with Him. I watched as the Lord poured out his Spirit on my wife! She came to me one day and shared that she had never in her life experienced so forcefully and tangibly the love of God for her. She said, “what do you make of this?” I said, “God is filling you with his Spirit!” She began getting up and spending hours in Bible reading and prayer. She was so filled with joy, she often would have a song in her heart that the Spirit would give her. When we discussed the Bible together, sometimes she would say things with such insight, that I would just sit there with my mouth open.
God’s work in her life spilled over into mine. I also started getting up super-early to read the Word and pray. At first pridefully, just because I didn’t want to be out-done by her, but then the Lord began to meet me and to break my pride. He humbled me in his presence. I began to have such a hunger for God that at times I thought it would consume me. I felt as if I would die if God did not hear my cries for more of him in my life. During that time, I changed my life verse to Psalm 27:4 One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.
When we arrived home last May, we were in Ohio, visiting family, and one of my wife’s aunts, a godly lady who is one of our Epaphrases, heard my wife describing these experiences and said, “God has burdened me to pray for you this past year almost every day. Now I know what it was for! Praise God for his work in your life.”
By the fourth and final year of our term, an amazing thing happened. I had set aside a half day to pray and seek the Lord and as I was praying, the Lord began to challenge me about my unwillingness to lead a church plant. So during one of my prayer times, I did something that I rarely do, in fact I don’t think I have ever done this before: I asked the Lord for a sign. Specifically, a sign that I was to be involved in church planting.
And the sign that I ended up asking of the Lord was one that for me seemed impossible. I said, “Lord, I need a sign that stretches my faith and that shows me that you are at work within me, and that your power is with me.” And so this is what I asked the Lord for. I said, “Lord Jesus, to plant churches I need to be able to lead people to you. If you will allow me the privilege of leading five individuals to you through my own personal evangelism by the end of this term, I will know that you can use me as a church planter.”
Now for a long time I have been faithful to share my faith with others, but I have never been one to see a lot of fruit from that evangelism. So for me to ask God to give me five conversions was a big step for me. I have never in my life led five people to Christ within the course of a year, and the time remaining in my term when I prayed this was about ten months.
To make a long story short, God answered that prayer in amazing ways. Adriana and Eriley were a couple that moved from the interior of the state to the capital city. They moved into an apartment right next door to the hotel where our church was meeting. We invited them to an evangelistic Bible study in our apartment, and at the conclusion of that study, they followed the Lord Jesus as his disciples.
They were followed by Mateus, a 14 year old boy who also followed Christ. Next in line was Vinicius, a young college student whose sister was already attending our church. Four conversions! Only one more to go, and Mateus’ mother, Marilene was involved in another evangelistic Bible study that was meeting in our home.
Would God grant us the five conversions I had asked for before the end of our term? I had not shared with my E-paphras network the numerical goal, but many people had been praying by name for Adriana, Eriley, Mateus, Vinicius, and Marilene. Over the course of those last months of our term, we received e-mails like these…
Remembering you and all the requests… Norm.
Alliance Women of New Hope Alliance Church in Angier, NC prays for your work on a regular and faithful basis.
I just wanted you all to know that although I have never met you in person, we think of you often and pray when we get your e-mail updates.
We rejoice with you over the news of Vinnie's conversion…. We are taking the requests you made... before the Lord. How we rejoice to hear of the working of the Holy Spirit in hearts and lives! We pray for you regularly.
Alliance Women of New Hope Alliance Church in Angier, NC prays for your work on a regular and faithful basis.
I just wanted you all to know that although I have never met you in person, we think of you often and pray when we get your e-mail updates.
We rejoice with you over the news of Vinnie's conversion…. We are taking the requests you made... before the Lord. How we rejoice to hear of the working of the Holy Spirit in hearts and lives! We pray for you regularly.
One week before we were to leave Brazil for the States, we concluded our final Bible study. Marilene had not yet made a decision to follow Christ. But on the next Sunday, which was Mother’s Day, and the day before we were to get on the plane to leave Brazil, she came to me and said, “I have decided to follow Jesus. I want to be baptized with my son.” Five conversions… exactly what I had asked God for.
Through this miraculous answer to prayer, and through the prayers of many faithful Epaphrases, God had renewed the calling of a discouraged missionary.
But let’s go back to Colossians 4 to see more about who Epaphras was and how he prayed.
Colossians 4:12
“Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God. 13For I bear him witness that he has worked hard for you and for those in Laodicea and in Hierapolis.”
Epaphras was an intercessor. It says here that he “struggled” on behalf of the Colossians in his prayers.
Struggling in Prayer
What does it mean to “struggle” in behalf of someone in your prayers? The greek word used here for "struggle" is used only one other time in Colossians, but in a way that sheds light on Epaphras’ struggle in prayer.
Colossians 1:28-29
“Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works in me.”
What was Epaphras’ struggle in prayer? I believe it was the same struggle that Paul described in this verse: it was a spiritual toil, as the energy and strength of Christ powerfully worked through him in prayer. The fact that he struggled doesn’t mean that prayer was a drudgery for him. It was not the struggle to stay awake, or to know what to pray. It was not the struggle of trying to discipline himself to pray when he would rather be doing other things. His struggle was the exertion of spiritual energy to accomplish the work of God.
Prayer is the exertion of spiritual energy to accomplish God’s work.
The struggle of prayer is when God’s grace is working in us, giving us the spiritual energy to accomplish through our prayer what he desires to do. Picture an olympic weightlifter. He lifts a barbell that you and I wouldn’t be able to budge. What is impossible for us is possible for him because of the strength that is flowing through his muscles. In the same way, what is impossible for us in our flesh, is possible as God’s strength flows through us by his indwelling Spirit.
Paul said in Romans 15:30 “Strive together with me in your prayers to God…” And that is the same challenge that I make to our prayer supporters. Strive together with us in your prayers to God. God’s strength will flow through you as you pray, and will impact eternity as God works powerfully through your prayers.
But let’s look further at what Paul teaches us about prayer in Colossians 4. Even though Epaphras isn’t mentioned until v. 12, I believe that he prayed the way Paul challenged the Colossians to pray in vs. 2-3. Verse 2 begins with this very clear directive: Continue steadfastly in prayer.
Continuing in Prayer
That doesn’t need a whole lot of exegesis to be much clearer. “Continue”: Don’t just pray once and stop. Don’t just pray once in a while. Continue in prayer. And continue “steadfastly” in prayer. Even when it’s difficult. Even when you are tempted not to pray. Even when you don’t feel like praying. Be steadfast in your praying. Even when you aren’t seeing the answers to prayer that you would like to. Don’t give up. Don’t give in. Be steadfast in your prayer. Devote yourselves to prayer (NASB/NIV).
Are you praying that way? Are you willing to pray that way? Are you willing to simply pray today, “Lord, help me to be one who is steadfastly continuing in prayer. Do that in me, Lord.”
Being Watchful in Prayer
Moving along in the text, we are also challenged to “be watchful” in prayer. Other versions say “keeping alert in it”. What do you think it means to “be watchful” in prayer? I meditated on that for a good while and also did a word study to see in what other ways this word “watchful” is used in the NT, and I came to the following conclusion:
“Being watchful” in prayer means being attuned to what
God desires to do in the invisible realm of the Spirit.
Consider the following three occurrences in the New Testament of the greek word “watchful”.God desires to do in the invisible realm of the Spirit.
- Matthew 26:38-41 Jesus asks the disciples to “keep watch” with him in Gethsemane.
- Acts 20:31 Paul warns the Ephesian elders to “be alert” for false teachers
- I Peter 5:8 Peter warns us to “be watchful” for the devil’s attacks.
In Acts 20, Paul warned the Ephesian elders to be alert for false teachers. To be aware that an individual is a false teacher, you have to be in tune with the Holy Spirit. You have to be able to recognize spiritual error even when everything looks good on the outside.
Finally, in I Peter 5:8 we are warned to be watchful for the devil’s attacks. If you aren’t spiritually vigilant, and aware that Satan is out to trip you up, you’ll be blindsided by him. You can’t see him, but he is there, working to attack you.
So in this same vein, being watchful in prayer is being in tune with the Holy Spirit. It is being aware of what God desires to do in a given situation because you are in touch with him through prayer.
Listen to this amazing e-mail from Debra Blackwell, a C&MA missionary in Guinea, West Africa. In a previous e-mail, she had asked for prayer for a vibrant Christian woman named Umu, whose husband is a devoted muslim.
Umu told me to tell you that every time she starts to pray for her children, the Lord shakes His head and tells her “No. Pray for your husband.” She always laughs as she shares with me how the Lord directs her in HIS path of prayer. So she says you aren’t supposed to pray for her kids, but to pray for her hubby. God wants to bring Mr. Barry to His throne, and He certainly will.What makes this request so amazing is that Umu is telling us that the Lord has revealed to her a very specific way to pray for her family. Pray for this… don’t pray for that. As Debra says, “the Lord directs her in HIS path of prayer.”
I got another e-mail while on this tour that also reminded me of being led by the Lord in our prayers. "My brother, God keeps on making me pray for you, I don’t know why. I have also prayed for your wife and sons. You have prayer supporters, one of them is me."
How can we become intercessors who are led by the Holy Spirit in this way as we pray?
First of all, we need to immerse ourselves in the Word of God. God’s Word is our primary source of information about God’s eternal purposes. It is through the Word that we learn his promises, that we understand more and more of his purposes in life and death and relationships and conflict and natural disasters, and everything else that is happening around us in our world.
And then, as we are immersed in the Word, his Spirit will guide us in our praying so that we are praying according to his specific will in each situation. His Spirit will enable us to apply with divine wisdom the revelation of the Word of God to the specific situations that we are praying for. Perhaps the Spirit will remind us of specific scripture promises to pray for specific situations.
So when we are being “watchful in prayer” and we receive a missionary prayer letter, or information about any situation that God leads us to pray for. We will pray in accordance with the will of God as revealed in his Word, as he guides us by his Spirit.
Being thankful in prayer
The third exhortation in verse 2 is that we are to be “thankful in prayer”. I see two different ways that we can put this into practice.
We can thank the Lord for the things that he has already done in answer to our prayers. One of the reasons it is so important for us to keep in contact with the missionaries we pray for is so that we can thank God for the specific things that he is doing. By reading this article, hopefully you now have some things to thank God for that he has done in Brazil.
And a second way that we can be thankful in prayer relates to being watchful in prayer. We can be thankful even as we intercede.
When we are praying for the salvation of a hardened sinner, we can be thankful that God’s power to save is greater than the hardest heart.
When we are praying for Indonesia after a Tsunami has devastated the area, we can be thankful that God will use it for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. We can also be thankful that he is rich in mercy and shows grace to all those refugees who call on him.
When we are praying for the financial resources that we desparately need in the Great Commission Fund. We can thank him that his strength is made perfect in our weakness. We can thank him that the silver is his and the gold is his, as it says in Haggai.
As we continue into vs. 3-4, Paul then narrows the focus to their intercession for his personal ministry as an apostle. He says, “At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison—that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak.”
Paul is saying, “Now I want you to take what I just taught you about prayer in v. 2 and apply it in service to me and my ministry.” And the specific ministry that Paul has in mind is the proclamation of the Gospel, the mystery of Christ. He wants them to pray that he will have opportunity to preach the gospel, and that he will be able to make the gospel message clear.
Brothers and sisters, I am making the same appeal to you that Paul made to the Colossians. Will you pray also for us? Continuing steadfastly. Being watchful. And praying with thanksgiving. Interceding for us, asking that God may open to us a door for the word, and then enabling us to proclaim the gospel message with clarity.
Thank you for being an “Epaphras” for us!
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