The Prayer Paul Didn’t Pray

Sometimes the most revealing part of a prayer is what it leaves out.

Paul is sitting in prison with every reason to ask for the obvious things. Get me out, change the judge’s mind, keep me safe, fix my circumstances. Count how many of those he actually asks for.

He asks for none of them.

Instead he prays that their love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, which is a startling request from a man in chains. He isn’t praying for relief; he’s praying for their love to grow, and not merely to grow but to grow intelligent.

Paul understands something we tend to miss. Love without knowledge collapses into sentimentality, and sentimentality can’t tell good from best. It says yes to everything, burns out, and calls the exhaustion love. Knowledge without love hardens into arrogance. Paul wants both, a love that’s informed and a knowledge that’s warm.

So that you may be able
to discern what is best.

Discernment, in other words, is downstream of a growing love. That isn’t how most of us approach a hard decision. We go looking for more information, more counsel, another pro-and-con list. Paul says the real bottleneck is rarely information. It’s a love that hasn’t matured enough to see clearly.

Then the chain keeps going through purity and blamelessness and fruit, and look where it lands: on the glory and praise of God. Every single thing in this prayer terminates on God’s glory rather than on their comfort or their happiness.

So here’s the exercise, and it stings a little. Put your prayer list next to Paul’s.

Most of ours are circumstance lists. Heal this, provide that, open this door. Nothing is wrong with those prayers. But if that’s the entire list, we’ve been asking almost exclusively for our conditions to change and almost never for our love to grow.

Paul had every excuse to pray small, and instead he prayed for the one thing that chains couldn’t touch.