Praying through Ephesians Part 1

Geoffrey Athey, our new executive minister at Fairfax, has been meeting with people from our church and leading us in group prayer every Sunday morning at 8. I have found it both meaningful to pray before worship and helpful in growing my personal prayer life into something more than it was. One of the things we have been doing on Sunday morning lately has been praying through the book of Ephesians, for ourselves as a group but mostly, for our church. Since I was reading through the book of Ephesians anyway for my own personal Bible study, I decided to slowly pray through the book of Ephesians. What resulted from that study has been very meaningful to me, deepening my relationship and intimacy with God. I thought I would share some of what I learned here.

It is God’s “good pleasure” to make His will known to us. God is not waiting for us to mess up so that He can punish us. His good pleasure is to make us aware of His will for us. His timing is perfect, and at the right time He sent His Son, and at the right time, He will return and bring all things under one Head. If it is God’s good pleasure to make His will, and Himself, known to us, then we should be seeking His will with our every prayer.
There is a “right time” when Jesus will come again. It is not going to be about our convenience, or at just the specific time we decide to be obedient to His will. His will is known to us now, and we are responsible for seeking it.

It is a privilege to be able to pray this prayer, “God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, please give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that we might know You better.” Eph. 1:17. Paul prayed that God would give the Ephesians the spirit of wisdom and revelation…so that they might know God better. We can pray that for ourselves, and when you think about it, what a miraculous thing that is. We can ASK for the spirit of wisdom that we can know the Creator of all things….better. That is the purpose of godly wisdom…to know God and Jesus better. That is enough to think about right there. We have the internet, and most of the time now, people go to the internet to find out answers to life. I find that risky, to say the least. What is the internet but a compilation of the wisdom of man, which, granted is vast, but in comparison to God’s wisdom? We don’t need man’s facts to the exclusion of God’s truth and wisdom.
The only place we can go to find wisdom is before God.