What to Pray For?

As a pastor I am often asked to pray for people. People come to me with requests to pray for illnesses of themselves and their family, financial hardships, difficulty with family, spiritual guidance and the list could go on . . . and on. As you can imagine I spend a lot of time praying, not just for other's prayer requests, but also for my own. All this praying is good, however while teaching on the Trinity at a youth conference recently it occurred to me that one of the most important things to pray for is often overlooked.

I was teaching on how the Church is to be a relational community similar to that of the Trinity and read a passage out of John 17 where Jesus prays for all the future Christians. In his prayer he prays that we would all be united so that the world might believe he has been sent by the Father. For some reason something new clicked. Jesus just prayed that we would expand his kingdom through our unity. In the past I had focused so much on this as a passage on unity that I missed what Jesus was praying for. He was praying that we would expand the kingdom, that our lives would be witnesses of him. After the conference was over I had to look into this. I that one of the most commonly things prayed for in the New Testament is the spread of the gospel. Think about there are tons of prayers about expanding the gospel, "thy kingdom come on earth," "this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent," "pray that I may declare it (the gospel) fearlessly," "I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now." I could go on, but you see how often prayer is focused on evangelism.

I would argue that a majority of the prayers we send up to God are for things we need or want and a few of those prayers are that we would spread the gospel. While in the New Testament prayers for the expansion of the gospel are found everywhere. Imagine what could happen if we as Christians spend as much time praying for the growth of God's kingdom as we spend praying for our temporary desires to be met.