Now I'd like for you to envision that you have completely been obedient to the Lord's instructions that we have been studying in Ephesians chapter six about putting on the armor of God. I want you to have this in mind to your best ability. You have readied yourself. You've adjusted the belt of truth, making sure you have sincere thoughts and actions. Your heart pounds under your breastplate, it almost rings. You scuff the dirt under your feet with your nail-studded boots. like a football player with cleated shoes. Satan is not gonna make you doubt your salvation and your right standing with God. Your shield of faith is raised across your body in anticipation of the fiery barrages of doubt and fears to come. You reach up and you reposition your helmet. You gingerly test the sharpness of the edge of your sword, reviewing all the Bible verses that you've memorized. Now look around and see that you are not alone. Others around you are also armored. Do you have the picture? Having suited up for battle, what do we do now? Stand around and wait? Crouch in a corner ready to pounce? Paul's exhortation. is actually much simpler and more effective. We are to pray. Making constant petitions with perseverance, Paul himself wished to show that you and I can be clothed in God's armor. having the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, our feet shod with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, and yet fail to triumph because we do not call on God. Many Christians can trace the secret of a defeated life to prayerlessness. The enemy approaches. A thousand swords ring from their scabbards in dreadful symphony. The warriors stand motionless, breathing heavily. And then the Christian soldier does the most amazing thing. He falls to his knees in deep, profound prayer. Oh, to be sure, there will be action. He will rise and his shimmering sword will flash. But all will be done in prayer. because prayer is primary. This is the precise form of the Ephesians 6 picture. We read immediately after the Christian warrior's spiritual armor, this verse that we come to today. Ephesians 6, 18, it reads this way. Praying at all times in the spirit with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance. Making supplication for all The saints. Those who would engage in spiritual warfare. Regardless of how well they wear truth and righteousness and faith and salvation. Regardless of how well they are grounded in peace. Regardless of how well they wield the word. They must make prayer the main thing. The Christian soldier fights on his knees. Prayer is the first thing, the second thing, and the third thing. necessary to any ministry that God wants for you and I to engage in. Pray, therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, pray, pray, pray. Above all else, prayer expresses our reliance on God. How important is prayer? Well, Paul lets us know by repeating this word all four times in this verse. As if to say there is nothing that cannot be prayed for and there is no situation in which prayer is ineffective. He says that we should pray on all occasions. with all kinds of prayer and requests, always, and finally, for all the saints. The first element of all prayer is that it is to be spirit-directed and pray in the spirit. Verse 18 begins. Let me ask, How does prayer in the Spirit take place? What does that look like? How do you know if you're doing it? What does it mean to pray in the Spirit? The principle text which answers that question. is found in Romans 8, 26 and 27. I'll put it on the screen for you. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. So we see that the Holy Spirit prays for us, and he also joins us in our praying, infusing his prayer into ours. so that we pray in the Spirit. When we pray in the Spirit, two supernatural things happen to our prayers. First, the Holy Spirit tells us what we ought to pray for. Apart from the Holy Spirit's assistance, our prayers are limited to our own reason and intuition. But with the Holy Spirit's help, they move to a higher level. As we seek his help, he will speak to us through his word. which conveys his will regarding every matter and every principle. Furthermore, he will settle certain things in our hearts to pray for with the conviction that they are God's will so that we are praying in faith. The second supernatural thing that the Spirit does is the energy of the Holy Spirit for prayer. Energizing tired, even infirmed bodies, elevating the depressed to pray with power and conviction for God's work. Oh, how the Church of Jesus Christ needs to learn to pray in the Spirit. When we pray in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit tells us what we ought to pray for, and he provides the energy. Well, let's start with a challenge to pray on all occasions as we are instructed here in verse 18. Let me begin by asking you, when do you usually pray? I suppose there is hardly anybody, whether Christian or not, who does not pray when difficulty arises. Even professing atheists will sometimes break down and pray if things get bad enough. Sometimes they do it unconsciously, as when they exclaim, oh God, what am I going to do? But what is sad is the prayer life of genuine Christians is often not better than that. They will pray in church, sort of. They will often return thanks before plunging into a meal. But the times that they really pray, if they do really pray, are when things go bad for them and they find themselves in some difficulty. Well, it's not wrong to pray in sticky situations. That's not what I want to indicate. It may be even true that God puts us in some upside down situations to get us to pray. But what Paul is saying when he commends us to pray on all occasions here in verse 18, is that all situations in life should draw forth praise and prayer from us. If we're happy, we should express our happiness to God. If we're despondent, We should pray about what is making us despondent. We should pray in work situations. We should pray on vacation. We should pray when we are with friends, when we deal with enemies. There should be no situations in life from which prayers to God are absent. Now, the second thing Paul says about prayer is that we're to pray with all prayer and supplication. What does that mean? Well, there are undoubtedly some who read that phrase and think that it's kind of redundant. They think that all prayer is our requests. And so Paul basically, they think, is writing the same thing when he says prayer and supplication. But are they? No, this is a case in which one term includes the other, but in which this is not true of the reverse. Prayers include requests, but requests do not exhaust all prayers. There are many kinds of prayers that we should know about and that we ought to be using effectively. You perhaps know the little acrostic. It's often used to highlight what I think is a good pattern for praying, how prayers ought to look. And it's the acrostic of the word acts, A-C-T-S. Acts stands for, A, adoration. You first start off in adoration of God. And then you move from there to seek confession of any known sin. And then you move from there to thanksgiving, thanking him for what he's done. And then supplication, your requests. Adoration is a great place to begin. Because our prayers are never worth much unless we saturate it, inundate it with praising God. If we don't do that, if we don't let our minds be stretched by the thought of who he is, to whom we are praying, and what are the resources of this God that are placed at our disposal I don't think we will ever really be aware of God's presence, and I don't think we will really pray. Prayer will just be a little ritual that we go through. We'll just say, here I am, Lord, and this is what I want. The most important part of prayer is making sure that we really are coming to God. Meeting with Him. and requesting of Him those things that we need. In 2016, Pastor Andrew Wilson wrote in the January-February issue of Christianity Today magazine an article which I have in the past quoted in part in little bits and pieces of it. I just want to take a little bit of time here and read this article with you. I'll put it up on the screen as well here, but this is the article that he wrote. Most of us pray the Lord's Prayer backwards. A few years ago, my wife and I were on an Air New Zealand flight that felt like it was falling out of the sky. Approaching the Queenstown Airport, we were caught in a giant wind tunnel. The plane was shuddering and sporadically dropping 50 feet at a time. The cabin filled with shrieking and praying. Many people were crying out to a God in whom they did not believe. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there certainly aren't many on buffeted flights. 30 minutes later, after having landed safely, the group of strangers waited at baggage claim looking awkwardly at each other. No doubt many of them felt silly. The content of those prayers fascinated me. I suspect it reflects the way many of us intuitively pray. The most common petition I heard was some variant of, deliver us from evil, help, save us, and oh God, please don't let me die. Crisis prompts cries for deliverance with an immediate need for safety drowning out all other concerns. The other prayer I heard, though more infrequently, was, forgive us our sins in some form or another. I'm sorry, and God, please forgive me. People want to be at peace with God when they die. So after crying out for rescue, they apologized as they prepared to meet their maker. After these sorts of petitions, most of us pray please, probably the most frequent type of prayer we utter. God, please give me this job. Please fix my marriage. Please keep my children safe. Please provide for my family. Or more traditionally, give us today our daily bread. Life comes first, then forgiveness, and then physical provision. Left to our own devices, we pray the Lord's Prayer backwards. Without being taught, we say, help, then sorry, then please do X for me, and then please do Y for others. And then we begin to appreciate more fully the one to whom we are praying, not just as the one who dispenses safety, redemption, and material goods, but for his own sake. Yet Jesus taught us to pray it forwards. The topsy-turvy order of the Lord's Prayer is one reason it is so remarkable. Jesus wanted to make sure the disciples never forgot that prayer is not intended, get this, to move from action to relationship. Instead, it is intended to move from relationship to action. This, then, is how you should pray. Our Father. Forget your formulas and your intercessory cards for a moment, and begin praying with one of the most basic words in a child's vocabulary. You are God's child, and He is your Father. Start there. And the rest will flow accordingly. Now, the second word of the acrostic is confession. We start with adoration. Then we move to confession. This is an important kind of prayer. Having come into the presence of the Holy God and having bowed down before him, it is inevitable that sinful, past full thoughts and deeds will come to our minds and require confession. We've got to deal with these things. The final step in the acrostic supplications We're not gonna get far with these if we're still harboring sin in our hearts and clinging to those trespasses. Take a look at Isaiah 59 verses one and two with me here. Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save, or his ear dull that it cannot hear, but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear. Thanksgiving comes next. Adoration, confession, then Thanksgiving. It's the third kind of prayer. We're always ready to ask for things, but like the nine-heeled lepers who forgot to thank God, what he had already done, we're in many ways just like them. We forget that. And then, last, we make our requests. Then comes the yes, supplications. Our prayer life would be very poor if that's all we do. It will also be less than it can be if we do not do it at all. If we don't pray for what we want and lay our needs before the Lord. Jesus himself taught us to make requests, saying, give us this day our daily bread. Matthew 6, 11. If we come to God as he intends and pray for these things that are according to his will and pleases him, we can be confident that he will receive those things that we ask for. That's what 1 John 3 verses 21 and 22 tell us. Now in today's verse, Ephesians 6.18, it gives us one of the things that pleases God when we pray for it. The last part of verse 18 says, making supplication for all the saints. Now, We obviously can't pray for all the saints by name. I can't pronounce all the names of the saints in China. Don't even know them all. But we can pray generally in cases where we don't know who they are. And we can pray specifically where we do know the saints. To pray even generally will mean We've got to put some work into it. We've got to prepare for our prayer time. And that kind of preparation for prayer is probably foreign to a lot of believers. But if we're going to be obedient to this verse, we should prepare. Now what about the Christians in China? If we're to pray for them, we probably should know something about the state of Christianity in that country and something about the problems and the opportunities that they are facing right now. Perk up when the news is on and when you hear something happening in these other cultures. How about Christians in North Africa? Right now, there's a lot of Christians just simply because their Christians are being kidnapped and taken away from their villages. It's quite a different situation. We should make an effort to know what it is if we're going to pray intelligently and effectively. And our verse here is telling us we need to pray for all Christians, not just those that we know and love. So it's for many other groupings of believers, suffering Christians, Christians in positions of power, with their special temptations. I find myself praying an awful lot for the Speaker of the House right now. His name is Mike Johnson. He is well known for being a solid Bible student and teaching Bible studies in his office on Capitol Hill, inviting a lot of people in. I pray for that man diligently because, my, what a responsibility he has in leading the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. Pray also for isolated Christians, Christians in the East and the West, Christians of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Even in general terms, the list is extensive of those we are told to be praying for. Now, etched in between all prayer and supplication in Ephesians 6.18, and making supplication for all the saints in the same verse, we find these words, keep alert with all perseverance. As we pray, we must be on the alert, having our hearts trained to detect oncoming assaults from the enemy. No matter what, we must keep on praying, never becoming discouraged if victory takes longer than we expected. Remember too, That we're all targets of the same brutal, relentless forces of weakness. So much continually, we've got to continually lift up each other in prayer. This is why Paul goes on to say, for all the saints. From the least to the greatest, from the baby Christian still stumbling over the tiny obstacles that Satan tosses into his or her path, to the mature missionary trudging through spiritual jungles as Satan attempts to disrail his or her lifelong endeavors. From the first to last, a battle cry to the Christian believer. is pray. The cultivation of persistence was a reoccurring motif of Jesus' teaching on prayer. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, he called his followers together and he brought them to the thought of the tenacious pursuit of spiritual things, saying this in Matthew 7, 7. Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened to you. Now the Lord's language is very compelling here because of these three words, ask, seek, and knock. Do you realize this? They are ascending in intensity. Ask implies requesting assistance for a conscious need. We realize our lack and so we ask for help. The word also suggests some humility in asking since it's commonly used of one asking a superior for something. Now the next step, seek. It involves asking, but it adds action. The idea is not just to express our need, but to get up and look around for help. It involves effort. The final step, knock. This includes asking and persevering, like someone who keeps pounding on a closed door. Now the stacking of these words is extremely forceful. The fact that they are what's called in the original language, the Greek, their present imperatives, that gives them even more punch. The text actually reads, because these are present imperatives, here is the idea that they convey. Keep on asking and it shall be given to you. Keep on seeking and you shall find. Keep on knocking and it will be opened to you. This tenacity is exactly what Paul has in mind here in our passage on spiritual warfare as he calls us to be alert and keep on praying. Do we? Do we pray for our spiritual work? Are there individuals or ministries or groups for which we persist in prayer? There ought to be. We are in an invisible war, and those who persist in prayer will prevail. Our prayers should be as specific as possible, and I think Paul is bringing that out by showing himself as an example. He goes on and says, pray also for me. We move on, verses 19 and 20, and also for me. That words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly as I ought to speak. Paul asked for prayer that God would give him supernatural ability to proclaim the gospel with boldness. Now we usually think of Paul as being naturally fearless, in no way vulnerable to discouragement. We think of Paul as being unstoppable in the pursuit of his calling to preach wherever, whenever, and to whomever. But Paul was frail. Fallen human being, like the rest of us. And remember, he was under house arrest at the time that he was writing this. This is known as one of the prison epistles. He was in Rome at the time when he wrote this. Under house arrest, an ambassador in chains, he reminds us in this verse. The victim of frustrating effects of Satan's warfare. against the saints, unfair. Paul needed prayer from his fellow believers, fearing that the mystery of the gospel might get stuck in his throat, muffled by fears about what might happen to him or his loved ones if he spoke with too much zeal. Here, Paul probably was not referring to witnessing or preaching the gospel of Christ. Instead, he may have been referring to his need to be bold. Twice, he said, fearlessly. And clearly regarding the mystery of the gospel when he would be on trial before Caesar in Rome. when and if the Jewish accusers would make charges against him. Paul was human just like you and me, yet he was humble and honest enough to admit his need to ask for help both from God, his defender, and from the people of God, his support. How is prayer to be used in combat? You already know this, but let me just say. That our use of prayer is not so that God can be informed of ours and the needs of other saints. You know, according to Matthew 6, 8, God knows what we will ask for before we even ask it of him. Does God need to know the urgency we feel? I don't think so, and here's why. God is far more ready to give us what we need than we are to ask it. Let me show you a great verse. Look at this. This is Isaiah 30, verse 18. I love it. Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you. And therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all those who wait for him. The next verse, I didn't put it up there, verse 19 goes on to say he will grant you your requests. You see, God wants us to acknowledge and God wants us to fully trust him. He wants us to see him as our source and enablement, enabler. God is more willing to work on our behalf than we are. He is worthy of our praise. He is worthy of our expressing full trust in his ability, in his perfect timing, in his wisdom, and is willing to give us what is best. Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, familiar verse to many of you. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths. John Piper, in one of his earlier books many years ago, His well-known book Desiring God wrote this. Unless I'm badly mistaken, one of the main reasons so many of God's children don't have a significant life of prayer is not so much that we don't want to, but that we don't plan to. If you want to take a four-week vacation, you don't just get up one summer morning and say, hey, let's go today. You won't have anything ready. You won't know where to go. Nothing has been planned. But that is how many of us treat prayer. We get up day after day and realize that significant times of prayer should be a part of our life, but nothing's ever ready. We don't know where to go. Nothing has been planned. No time, no place, no procedure. And we all know that the opposite of planning is not a wonderful flow of deep, spontaneous experiences of prayer. The opposite of planning is the rut. If you don't plan a vacation, you will probably stay home and watch TV. The natural unplanned flow of spiritual life sinks to the lowest ebb of vitality. There is a race to be run and a fight to be fought. If you want renewal in your life of prayer, you must plan to see it. Therefore, my simple exhortation is this. Let's take time this very day to rethink our priorities and how prayer fits in. Make some new resolve. Try some new venture with God. Set a time, set a place. Choose a portion of scripture to guide you. Don't be tyrannized by the press of busy days. We all need mid-course corrections. Make this a day of turning to prayer for the glory of God and for the fullness of our joy. I'm gonna close our study of Paul's letter to the Ephesians today, right now, with the final four verses that take us to the end of this letter. The emphasis that Paul makes in his very last words, I'm gonna ask that you pray diligently that it would be dominant here at Living Water. I'm gonna ask that you pray that we would experience very much God's grace and have Christ's love incorruptible. as he puts it in these final verses. Here they are, right here. So that you also may know how I am and what I'm doing, Tychicus, the beloved brother and faithful minister in the Lord, will tell you everything. I have sent him to you for this very purpose, that you may know how we are and that he may encourage your hearts. Peace be to the brothers and love with faith from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Grace be with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with love incorruptible. Now Paul's letter to the Ephesians has been filled with essential doctrine and encouragement. But all the doctrinal precision that we could have means nothing. Nothing without a love for each other. In our study of Ephesians, we have seen Paul repeatedly urging his readers to have an incorruptible love of Jesus Christ and a faithful love of the brethren. Paul used the noun love agape ten times in the Ephesian letter. In fact, Ephesians averages more references to love per chapter than any of Paul's other writings. Now given this strong emphasis of love, I find it very ironic, sad indeed. that in the church of Ephesus, they seem to have passed down everything to the next generation, but that all-important fruit of the Spirit. About 35 years later, Christ himself, through the apostle John, had this to say to this very church, the church at Ephesus. We read it in Revelation 2, 4, and 5. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember, therefore, from where you have fallen. Repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place unless you repent. Do you realize that today Ephesus is located in modern-day Turkey, a land without the lampstand of Jesus? It's a Muslim nation. Their love had become corrupted and then nonexistent. They didn't repent. And their lampstand was removed. What a valuable lesson to learn from the Ephesians. Paul wrote more about love per chapter than he wrote to any other church. And they did not repent. We got to remember to stand firm in doctrinal truth. without losing our love for God and for each other, for fellow believers, and our love for the lost. Living water needs you to pray, pray, pray. Pray that we will have a love for the Lord Jesus Christ and for each other that is pure. Not corrupted with wrong motives and secret disloyalties. Let's go to war.