Monday, November 21, 2011

How To Pray For A Friend Ephesians 3:19

The apostle Paul gives us many examples of prayer, and in one makes some beautiful requests for his friends- beautiful but not shallow.

"And to know this love that surpasses knowledge- that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." Ephesians 3:19, NIV.

IT IS THE BEST
You can pray many things for a person, but the best is that they know the love that comes from God: forgiving, patient, sacrificial, fatherly, kind, and more than we can contemplate here.

This love surpasses knowledge; it is big beyond the limits of our capacity to contain it. If you summed up all knowledge, it would not approach the volumes yet to know about God's love. Yet it must be knowable, or else the apostle would not pray that the Christians would experience that love.
Ephesians 3:18

KNOW
"Know" has many meanings. There is "to know," as with your mind, the intellectual knowledge of learning and study. We should all strive to learn about God and read His Word and learn from others what they know about God. "Know" can be used as the knowledge of experience, the intimate knowledge that comes from a relationship with God. If all you know about God's love is from books, you will have shallow knowledge. If all you know about God's love is from experience, it will be sentimental and immature. The knowing of God's love must have a balance of both learnings from His revelation to us and learning from his relationship with us.

GOD'S LOVE
Some do not know God's love. They have not come to God through the loving work of his Son, Jesus, on their behalf when he died for their sins on the cross. In rejecting the ultimate expression of love, they reject the ultimate love in their lives.

Even those of us who have come to God and have a relationship with him are far from understanding the depths of his love for us.  We need God to show us and teach us the dimensions of his love.  We need to make it a priority and a goal to know his love, experience it, and share it.

As we pray for our friends, we should make it our earnest prayer that they come to know God's love more deeply and personally.  If we feel we do not know God's love ourselves, we need to pray and ask God that we may know it.

(c)Adron Dozat 11/21/11