Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 9

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

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The Apostle Paul

Lesson Transcript

We’re now going to consider the Apostle Paul’s life and ministry of prayer. And to do so, an appropriate hymn is a Pietist hymn that is simple and yet so full of thanksgiving for daily life and also expresses the universalism of the Gospel.

Now thank we all our God,

With heart and hands and voices,

Who wondrous things has done,

In whom this world rejoices;

Who from our mothers’ arms

Has blessed us on our way

With countless gifts of love,

And still is ours today.

I want as a prelude to this wonderful inspirer… And nobody has given me more inspiration than the Apostle Paul. I love him, deeply love him, for all that he suffered and all that he communicates so powerfully to us of the grace and love of our God. Perhaps you can reflect on four verses of scripture. The first is Ephesians 6:18, ‘Pray in the spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.’ And of course, he invites us to have a life of prayer and so Colossians 4:2 expresses it, ‘Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.’ But then again, as he writes in Philippians 4:6–7, ‘Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving present your requests to God and the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.’ And again, Romans 12:12,14: ‘Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse.’

In order to understand Paul’s own Christian consciousness, we should realise what radical changes he gives compared with the culture of the world in which he lived. And he’s not ashamed to proclaim it, for he’s creating a new freedom for humanity with a wholly new polemic of what it is to have an identity in Christ. He says, first of all, we’re all mere Christians. There’s no hierarchy, no ethnic distinctions. There’s neither Jew nor Gentile, bond or free, male or female. Secondly, we deepen our faith by being educated in faith as we pursue our daily tasks. Paul was a highly educated Roman citizen and yet we need to use our minds to bring into captivity all our intelligence, all our education, under Christ. And thirdly, we do not have a professional identity. We have primarily one and one identity and that’s of being and living in Christ. It’s a huge sea change both in the flux of the Classical world and certainly in the flux of today’s self-identifying as to who I am. The basic understanding of what it is to be in Christ needs to be so deeply understood today just as much as it ever was in Paul’s generation. Yes, it’s a different context; nevertheless, in many ways the same reality. And so it’s within this social grid we might say that Paul is communicating to us.

[00:05:00]

We can see that when Paul speaks of his non-Christian past and the kind of identity that he had within the Classical Roman society, he describes himself within the honour system of the educated Classical society. That is to say, that one’s identity was much more a social given. If you were born a freeman, privileged to live in a Roman city, you had great opportunities for life, which you wouldn’t have if you were born a slave or born into a non-Roman city. So see how Paul describes his own origins in Philippians 3:5. Yes, he comes from the people of Israel, from the tribe of Benjamin, He’s a Hebrew born of the Hebrews. Yes, he’s able to say this because he’s speaking to a Jewish community. But when he talks about himself as the Apostle to the Gentiles or to a pagan community, then he speaks as having been born at Tarsus in Cilicia, which is a Roman city. And we find him speaking about himself as a Roman citizen. And because he’s a Roman citizen, that determines the whole juridical process of his trial that takes place from Jerusalem to Rome because he’s not under the authority of the Jews. He’s under Caesar.

And so in this encomium, Paul depicts of himself at the same time a polemic against the Classical values of the sense of identity and consciousness that a Roman citizen might have. So he speaks constantly about the contrast between his former life, which he calls the anastrophe, and now his new life in Christ. You know, I suspect Paul didn’t think of being born again just once for all experience. He was thinking of this as the progression of all of his life.

[00:07:22]

At the same time, Paul’s identity was social, not individualistic like ours. And in the honour culture, public life was highly significant and only important people were modal persons of high moral standard in politics as to form but not necessarily in substance. Moreover, what is characteristic of the period is that identity was porous. That is to say, that it was subject to the possession of evil spirits such as we see in the casting out of evil spirits in so much of our Lord’s ministry as well as with the Apostles. And within this national biography, this social grid, we find that he sees his identity as no longer legislated by Roman Law, nor is it legislated by the Classical heritage of education: his awareness that he’s now identified by God and God alone. And so just as Jeremiah 1:5 says that before I formed you in thy mother’s womb, I knew you. Yahweh speaks to the prophet: before you were born, I consecrated you. Or as Isaiah 49:1 puts it: the Lord called me through his grace in the womb. Paul is saying the same thing in his controversy with the Galatians in Galatians 1. Yes, he says, it’s God who formed me even in the womb.

The other thing that is also polemical in Paul’s understanding of his identity is that like the encomium of a prophet, like Jeremiah, he’s aware of the calling that God is giving to him. So instead of being mentored by his Classical tutors only, he is primarily being taught of God so that Christ becomes his paideia, his teaching mentor. So he disclaims having any human teachers, but rather insists that the Gospel proclaimed by me is not of human origin, nor did I receive it from human source, nor was I taught it, as he explains in Galatians 1:12. He receives it through revelation. And this is now a new technical term that is counter to the paideia when he speaks about theodidaktos. That is to say, he is now one that is taught of God. And this becomes a new reality as we read in 1 Thessalonians 4:9, or again, in 1 Corinthians 2:13, he’s now being taught by the Holy Spirit.

And again, a third polemic in his bio we might summarise by saying that Paul is aware that in the Classical values one made a threefold boast of one’s identity. You boasted of the deeds of the body because you displayed them in the training in the gymnasium. You boasted of the deeds of the soul because you belonged to a school of philosophy, to the academy. And you also boasted of the deeds of fortune. You had these threefold boastings that established your social consciousness. But what does Paul say? He speaks of his shameful bodily condition. He had an appearance that was not attractive, nor did he speak with the eloquence of the rhetoricians. And so in speaking to the proud Corinthians he confesses I was with you in weakness and much trembling. And so he says, after describing the enormity of his sufferings at the end of 2 Corinthians 11:12, where I am weak, there I am made strong. And so he says if I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness—2 Corinthians 11:29–30.

[00:12:01]

The whole theology of Paul is indicating that his consciousness is no longer self-consciousness. It’s the consciousness of the cross. It’s the consciousness of being crucified with Christ. It’s the consciousness of weakness becoming the source of a new strength. And he says it’s for the sake of Christ I’m content with weaknesses, insults, persecutions, calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong—2 Corinthians 12:9–10. Again, another polemic against the Classical consciousness is seen in the way that Paul recognises that the cardinal virtues of Stoic philosophers, which were fortitude, prudence, justice and temperance, did give in the military culture of the Roman world the supremacy. He does speak on one occasion about good courage, but most of the time, like John, another of the Apostles, he speaks about this word parrhesia. That is to say, speaking it all out, holding nothing back, saying everything there is to be said in transparency. It’s a boldness emotionally that often we don’t have. But for Paul, the notion of weakness becoming strength arises from the fact that he has full boldness to enter into the presence of Christ, as the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us, because of the new and living way that Christ as our great high priest has opened up to us. And because therefore he’s imputed his righteousness to us as the basis of life.

[00:14:04]

Another polemic that Paul is using to communicate about himself and his consciousness is the significance of fortune. There’s no good luck for Paul. Kairos, which means time that is given by the gods, refers to this youth that was the god of the Olympics: a naked youth with a forelock of hair in front of his head and the rest shaved, so if you want to grab him, you grab him by the forelock as he’s fleeting by. He’s flashing by. In the Olympics, he’s going to be the gold medallist, so you’re not going to catch him very easily. So the idea that by chance you get hold of him is lucky fortune indeed. So that is what life is to the Greek. It’s a very chance affair: gambling with the roulette wheel. It’s a chance event. Now Paul is using kairos to indicate God’s time. Now is the accepted kairos, the accepted day of the Lord. Now it’s kairos that transforms our life to live in the light of eternity. So Paul reminds us in writing to Timothy in his second Epistle that we’re to be in season and out of season. What does that mean? It means that whether we think that being in kairos gives us blessings or whether we’re living in adversity, it’s all God’s kairos. There’s no place for fortune, for chance, for indeterminacy about the Christian life, for all things work together for good for those who love Him.

[00:16:03]

So I’m expressing all this in order to help us to realise the extraordinary depth with which Paul sees himself in the reconstitution of his life in Christ. How much deeper this is than just simply our cognitive approach to the Christian life. You might say that his ultimate sense of consciousness was that he was simply sent of the Lord. And so Krister Stendhal, the Bishop of Stockholm, as he reflected once in a lecture at Yale, what was the Damascus Road experience: was it Paul’s conversion, or was it Paul’s calling? Of course, it was both. But by being Paul’s calling, it meant that the conversion experience never ceased. So what is so significant to inspire us about the Apostle is that all the activity that we’re engaged in, all the travelling that we’re doing, all that we are teaching, is not to impart information or filling out timetables with busy-ness, but it’s the purpose of seeing the transformation of the lives of others. As we have been transformed in Christ, so all our ministry is looking for transformation.

One of the things that’s often rebuked me in my teaching is am I simply imparting information, interesting as it might be to our students, or am I expecting after every class for them to have had some experience of transformation? They come in with sad and heavy-laden expressions of the burden of all that’s going on in their lives. Do they leave the class with joy on their faces? And that joy is expressing the potency of how Paul would seek to see our lives being transformed. And of course, one of the great passions that Paul has is for unity within diversity, the freedom to be different, the freedom to have various different experiences of life, to acknowledge that we have different gifts, that we have different narratives and that therefore we should recognise the extraordinary diversity in every possible way in which God is speaking to each of us in turn.

[00:19:14]

So now we turn to the prayer life of the Apostle. There are about 30 to 40 identifiable prayers in Paul’s letters. Prayer and friendship are inseparable in his ministry. The whole ministry of Paul communicating the Gospel is done through letters. It’s this epistolary character of the letter that means that you never can separate the letter of friendship from his own prayer life. His greetings at the beginning of the letter, his salutations, his farewells, his hopes, his admonitions, his pastoral concerns, his travel plans, are all cast in the language of the letter and also in the language of prayer. That’s why many years ago I felt led to write about prayer as friendship. It was Paul who inspired me to think in those terms.

The epistolary genre was highly developed in Roman culture as being formal, rhetorical and flattering. But as scholars have pointed out, Paul’s letters are not epistles in the Roman sense. These Roman epistles were pompous, honorific, boastful and prideful. So what is significant about the New Testament is that 21 of its 29 books are familial letters written with the humility of Christ and written to house groups, as we read in the letter to the Philippians. And of course, it’s in this humility that he has to rebuke both the Corinthian and the Galatian churches. So his genre is the domestic letter. It’s written in the domestic language of kenotic language, of self-emptying oneself, of humiliation, of compassion for others. It’s not written in Classical Greek. It’s hidden in the homespun Greek of ordinary people at the hearths of domesticity. It’s to have one’s life in focus. The focus developed during the meals, conversations, and prayers that occurred around the warmth of the fireplace that is expressed in the Greek word [Hestia Ἑστία, “fireside” meaning the hearth. It’s being at the heart of the family. That’s being in focus. It’s all about the relations of husbands and wives, of parents and children, of masters and servants.

[00:22:32]

And the prayerful language that Paul is primarily using is confessional on the one hand and doxological on the other. You see, the very nature of confessional life is the ability to use parrhesia, to have boldness, to tell it as it is. And when the whole of your inner life has been purgatively dealt with then you’re prepared to let it all be illuminated. And so the illumination is there as well as the union that is there. So what became a monastic tradition of the three stages of purgation and illumination and union is all implicitly in Paul’s prayer life. And so the salutations are the salutations of entering into a new consciousness, a new identity. So let’s look at some of the distinctives of his prayers and his letters.

First of all, Paul prays for himself. He gives us different vignettes of his own inner personal life. He says I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you, as he writes in Romans 1:10. And then he says I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my race, the people of Israel—in Romans 9:3. And again he says in Romans 10:1: brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. Or again, writing to the Corinthians, three times he says I have pleaded with the Lord to take this affliction, this thorn in the flesh, from me, but He said to me my grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness: 2 Corinthians 12:8–9. Again he says, day and night, we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith. And now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus Christ clear the way for us to come to you: 1 Thessalonians 3:10–11.

So what are the impressions that these personal prayers that Paul has for himself in communicating to others indicating? They’re really indicating that always his great passion is concern for the spiritual welfare of others. That’s why his prayer life is so profoundly intercessory. It’s his concern for them, realising that the best way we communicate is from our hearts about ourselves. So he never separates his sense for their wellbeing from the sense of his own commitment. That’s why he avoids any hypocrisy about his ministry. He’s as concerned about himself and his own spiritual wellbeing as he is for their wellbeing. He never preaches in that sense from the pulpit. He’s in the congregation. They are all, in a sense, flowing one within the other. He realises, as he writes so honestly, that he’s not always as successful as people might think he is as an intercessor. So he tells us that when he asked three times that God would take away that thorn of affliction, he discovered that God is not bounded by our prayers, that when God says no, he’s still answering us, even when we want him to say yes.

[00:27:11]

And so one of the things that we discover is that prayer is not to be generalised. Prayer has to be specified to each circumstance, each moment, each particular context. There are many of us, when somebody asks us for a request or a help and we piously say well, I’ll pray about it, what are we doing? It’s hypocrisy. It’s a cop-out. So we have to realise the realism of what we mean, as Paul as gives us the realism of his prayer life. And when God doesn’t answer the prayer that we want Him to, could it be that we’re having to be tutored to recognise that God’s ways are not necessarily our ways. We may fight and scream against His ‘no’ to no avail. And so sometimes in an impasse Paul confesses, as he does in Romans 8:26, we do not know what we ought to pray for. We just don’t know. But in all the struggles, this is another lesson that Paul teaches us, that in all the struggles of petitionary prayer, we can always gain new insights into the sufficiency of His grace. God does not withdraw His grace when he says no. That’s when we know His grace much more profoundly. What we’re discovering is that God’s noes is surrendering to Him as a very slow process of learning the ways and the minds of the Lord.

On eight other occasions we find that Paul explicitly is asking the Church to pray for him and for his ministry. We haven’t time to narrate them all, but he says in Romans 15:30–32 ‘I urge you brothers by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit to join me in my struggle by praying to God for me.’ Pray that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea. Pray that my service in Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints there so that by God’s will I may come to you. Paul is thinking that if you pray for all these things then God is going triumphantly to allow him to come to Rome. No. When we look at the narrative of Paul’s journey to Rome, he prays twice and God says no. He blocks the access. He doesn’t get his own travel plans fixed. And when God says yes and he goes to Rome, it’s not the way that Paul expected to be in Rome. He didn’t expect to find himself so quickly the prisoner of the Lord yet once more.

[00:30:39]

One of the things that therefore is also profoundly significant about the prayer life of Paul is that in so many of his letters, they’re written from prison—to the Colossians, to the Thessalonians, to the Romans, to the Philippians. Yes, Paul is the prisoner of the Lord. And one of the most beautiful verses that because of the frustrations of my life I have loved so much about the Apostle, it’s been a murmur in my heart for many years, ‘I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you,’ as he writes to the Ephesians 4, ‘I… beseech you that you walk worthy of the Lord in all meekness and lowliness of heart.’ Why does God put us in prison? He does to transform us. When we’re out of prison, it’s so much easier to go our own way.

[00:31:50]

People don’t know that 30 years of my life have been spent in prison. But what I’ve discovered is that these are God’s angelic opportunities for so much transformation that we wouldn’t otherwise have. So don’t think that being a prayer warrior is going to keep you out of prison. You’re much more likely to be a prayer warrior when you’re in prison because then you discover freedom as you never can discover in the open air. For Paul, freedom is the freedom to be in a prison cell and there you’re profoundly free. So when the prison doors are opened, as they did in the earthquake in Philippi, Paul says to the gaoler don’t worry, we’re not running away; we’re free. We don’t need to leave this prison. Some of you may have seen the Larry King show recently of St Quentin prison where five who had become Christians were interviewed by Larry King over two or three nights. And one of them was asked you’ve been here for more than 25 years, are you looking forward to getting your release. He said God has brought me into a wonderful ministry and whether I’m released or not really doesn’t matter. I have freedom already. That kind of freedom is the freedom that we need to pray ‘Thy will be done’ regardless of my own natural desires and inclinations.

The real prayer that was the pulse beat of the Apostle was in 2 Thessalonians 3:1–2 where he says, ‘Finally, my brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honoured just as it was with you. And pray that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men.’ That’s it. We need deliverance from evil as our Lord taught us in the Lord’s Prayer. And as we see, although Paul had such a high quality and level of prayerfulness that is so profoundly bound up with his theology, he can still very simply ask as he prays in Philemon 1:22 prepare a guest room for me because I hope to be restored to you in answer to your prayers. What a domestic prayer that is. Just make sure that the prophet’s chamber is available.

[00:35:00]

So prayer is for almighty things. Prayer is for very simple things. What we can also say about Paul’s prayer life is that it’s a strongly paraenetic purpose. What we mean by paraenesis is that his prayers are to encourage one another and to build one another up. It’s this identification of a consciousness as being within the body of Christ encouraging one another. His ethics are for one another. That’s the difference between ethics and morality, as we’ll see later with Bonhoeffer. Morality is generalised behaviour. Ethics is personal relatedness to the other. And so we find that Pauline ethics are to love one another, to build one another up, to suffer with one another, of this unity of our lives in the one body. And so he writes to the Romans 15:5–6, ‘May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Or again, in verse 13, ‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.’ Or again, as we read in 1 Thessalonians 3:12–13, ‘May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. May you be strengthened in your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.’ And so in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, ‘May God Himself, the God of peace sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body, be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus.’

[00:38:00]

We also find in Paul’s theology of prayer that prayer becomes significant turning points, or climaxes, to all that he’s teaching. So we find the Apostle, for example, in the sublime prayer of Romans 3 that it’s an apex or climax of his own prayer life. He says, ‘For this reason I kneel before the Father.’ It’s interesting that he says I kneel before the Father because the Jews never kneeled. They stood. The people who kneeled were the pagans. And he’s speaking to, of course, a pagan world. But now they’re not to kneel before false gods; they’re to kneel before the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. ‘So for this reason I kneel before the Father from whom every family in Heaven and Earth derives its name.’ It doesn’t derive its name from Rome. It’s not based on Roman legislation. It’s derived from Abba Himself. ‘And I pray that out of His glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith and I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the Lord’s people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. And to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. ‘Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to His power that is at work within us. To Him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever.’

All of this is an echo of our own Lord’s prayer life, as he prays the high priestly prayer of John 17. Distinctively, as we’ve seen, Paul’s whole life is in Christ and this includes both groaning in prayer in Romans 8:26, which may have been Paul’s experience of glossolalia as well as being ecstatic in prayer, as he tells us explicitly was what he experienced in 1 Corinthians 14:18. Or we’re given God’s indwelling spirit as a pledge of future glory in Ephesians 4:30 in spite of all our weaknesses and afflictions and sufferings. There are times, like Paul, when we don’t know how to pray, but our needs and utter dependence direct us. So it’s a beautiful tribute that was given to the Apostle by Ambrose when he calls the Apostle ‘Christ’s second eye’. We are given bifocal vision to appreciate Christ ourselves, but also we can profoundly appreciate Christ through Paul’s eyes, too. That double-vision is what he gives to us and what quintessentially enables us, as encouraged by the Apostle, to be Christocentric, to truly have our identity in Christ.

[00:42:13]

Now for discussion in groups, may I suggest that first of all you consider that the passion that the Apostle Paul in prayer was for the maturity of Christians. And it’s a wonderful thing when we think of all our ministry and all our desires is that we’ll see others grow up in Christ to the fullness of the stature of being in Christ Jesus. So that is a profound element no doubt about the Apostle Paul.

At the same time, Paul is human like the rest of us and so the second question is that Paul had fears. He was timid. There were times when he felt in despair, so he went through all the human experiences like we do and like Jesus did himself. And so our prayer life should be also an exposé to other people of saying you have to pray for me because although I’m doing all this teaching and seeking to transform other people’s lives in Christ, I’m still a weak vessel and so I need to be strengthened. And Paul has all that humility to communicate that reality.

And the third question that we need to ask for discussion is it’s so easy when we have a ministry for others to forget the needs of our own life. And so it’s so easy to pontificate and to preach and to teach others and we realise that what about me? What about my growth? And so the integrity of being a true Christian is not that we have a social ministry, but we have a ministry for ourselves and that we balance our social duties and obligations with our own inner development that we need. And Paul in his humility is able to express both these realities at the same time.

[00:44:42]

And a fourth question for discussion is we talked about Paul and his freedom in prison. And so you may say well, I’ve never been in a prison. I’ve not been like those prisoners that Larry King was interviewing. So what are you talking about by having an imprisoned life? Prison begins when we get frustrated in our emotions. Prison is when I don’t get my own way. Prison is when I find that the things I wanted from God, He doesn’t give me. And so the metaphor of imprisonment is simply we’re not free to do what we like. And yet God uses that in such ways that I’ve always loved the phrase that it’s in my frustrations that we have God’s angelic ministrations.