When the Apostle Paul prayed, what did he ask God to do? This question is not meant to regulate or confine our prayers but to sharpen and elevate them.
If, when Paul mentioned his prayers, he detailed requests for personal safety for people he loved, it would inform our own prayers. But if he didn't, if he instead spent his time praying for the foundational and heart-level parts of those he loved, it would also shape us.
Christ, of course, told us to ask the Father for our daily bread and promised that all the practical needs of life would be taken care of if we pursued the kingdom—and his most famous ministry episodes involved feeding and healing whoever came to him (Matthew 6:10, 33, 8:17, 14:13-21). So even if Paul did not ask God to heal or provide for his friends, we cannot dismiss requests for healing or provision as unimportant or trivial. God is our Father. He wants us to depend on him. And prayer is one way we do so—even with the small concerns of everyday human life. So even if Paul never spilled one drop of New Testament ink detailing his prayers for his or others' daily bread, we would still be justified in praying this way.
But what does it say to us that when Paul detailed his prayers, his focus requests were not in the physical dimension but the spiritual one? He went straight for the heart and prayed for people to know God better. Consider this portion of a prayer from Ephesians—it is typical of many of Paul's written prayers:
"(I pray) that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe..." (Ephesians 1:17–19)
What did Paul want God to do? He wanted God to give his audience—the church of Ephesus, a church he loved and had sacrificed much time and energy shaping—insight and revelation into who God is. He wanted them to have an epiphany-like enlightening of the eyes so they could know the calling, riches, and power God had bestowed upon them. He wanted God to drive them deeper into an understanding of himself.
Other Pauline prayers repeat the same idea. In Ephesians 3, Paul prayed for the Ephesian church to know the love of Christ. In Colossians 1, Paul prayed for the Colossian church to have a knowledge of God and his will for them. It isn't that he only prayed for spiritual revelation. He also prayed for love between church members to increase and prayers of thanksgiving for the various people to whom he wrote. It's just that he spent most of his prayer time asking God to help people know God better and no time at all praying for them to be rescued from dangers or difficulties. He was one to pray for lessons to emerge from trials more than he prayed for release from them.
"In (Paul's prayers) he reveals what he asked most frequently for his friends—what he believed was the most important thing God could give them. What is that? It is—to know him better."[^1]
And it's not as if the people he wrote to didn't suffer. Their everyday manner of life was much more rugged than many of ours. And their version of Christianity was one saturated with hostility—they were truly sojourners and pilgrims. But, still, Paul left many of their trials alone and simply asked God to take them deeper into knowing him.
Perhaps Paul’s perspective can help both our prayers and our perspectives. When we pray, it seems important to go beyond mere needs and wants and into the structural parts of who we are. Designed in God’s image, we are meant to know and experience him, so this desire must populate our prayers for ourselves and others.
But our perspectives should also be transformed by Paul’s approach. If the most important thing is knowing our God, then lesser things, though not necessarily trivial to God, should not be the driving pursuit of our lives. Instead, our deepest longing should be to know God better.
[^1]: Keller, T. (2016). Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. Penguin Books.
