P review of:

Paul’s Prayers
Aligning the Righteous with God

Wendy Bowen
 PAUL’S PRAYERS
Introduction

The purpose of my instruction is that all

believers would be filled with love that
comes from a pure heart, a clear conscience,
and genuine faith.
– The Apostle Paul, 1 Timothy 1:5 NLT

A little over five years ago, I had a mid-prayer-life crisis. The Lord had
asked me to give away everything that I owned and to live by prayer and
obedience to His voice without asking man for anything that I needed. I
was already well into a walk of living in this manner with no home of my
own, no car, no money, no income, and most of the people in my life
thinking that I had lost my mind. I was fully dependent on answered
prayer for even my most basic needs. While these needs were always met,
sometimes even supernaturally so, it did not seem like anything else in
my life was going my way or the way that I thought God’s will should
look like.
I cried out to God in tearful exasperation, saying, “Well, clearly I don’t
know how to pray! I’m not praying anymore! You’re going to have to
teach me!” Up to this point, I had learned to pray in the way that the
Church teaches—promises from Scripture mixed with faith and
expectation…and voila! something exceedingly and abundantly beyond
what we dreamed of should happen. Not to mention, I had seen many
miracles on my path already, so I was fully assured that God was with me
and leading me. Plus, I suppose that I presumed that my radical and self-
sacrificial obedience to God’s voice should have procured even more
victory, success, and abundance for me. Instead, He was leading me on a
narrow and difficult path. Go figure.

1
 Aligning the Righteous with God

Please hear me. I was genuinely trying to pray what I believed to be God’s
will, but I did not understand His ways. My perceptions were immature
and my desires were carnal, even in the midst of definitive surrender and
obedience. It was as if the Lord was saying to me, as He did to Peter when
Peter refused to believe that it was God’s will for Him to suffer, “Get
behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. You have on your mind
the ways of man and not of God.” (see Matthew 16:23) Needless to say,
my life and my prayers were all being sifted, pruned, and crucified.
I did not hold to my vow of prayerlessness for very long but that was
mostly because I was involved in so many prayer groups. This said, these
meetings began to cause me agony in my heart because the Holy Spirit
within me did not bear witness to the things that people were praying.
During this time and in these meetings, the Holy Spirit would reveal to
me what was going to happen in the situations that we prayed about (and
it would come to pass exactly as the Holy Spirit said), but what was
prayed and what the Holy Spirit said were oftentimes as different as night
and day. I sat silently, not correcting anyone, being taught by the Holy
Spirit about the ways and will of God, and occasionally being mocked or
ridiculed for my silence.
About a year after my crisis of prayer and crying out to the Lord, the Lord
told me to stop attending prayer meetings and to stop praying for people
with the exception of praying into any prophetic insight or promptings to
prayer that He spoke to me directly. As is often the way of God,
something has to die before it can be resurrected. My prayer life laid
dormant for almost a full year before the Lord resurrected it with the
prayers of the Apostle Paul. This certainly does not make me a theological
expert on the topic and I’m not trying to be one. However, what I
discovered in Paul’s prayers is the heart of God, a mirror to the Lord’s
Prayer, a deep abiding in the ways of the Holy Spirit, and an effective way
of praying prayers that are affirmed in heaven and confirmed in the
earth.
Paul’s Prayers
While there are many volumes that could be written on the many
different forms of prayer, the Apostle Paul gives us an excellent and

2
 Paul’s Prayers

irrefutable example of how to pray and what prayer is really all about. His
prayers are found interspersed in his letters to the churches which
encompass most of the New Testament as we know it today. Even though
they were prayed from Paul’s heart for believers in the churches back
then, they are inspired by the Holy Spirit and are accurate in accordance
with the will of God. Arguably, they are the prayers that Paul would be
praying for us today if he were on earth, and they very well may be the
prayers that he is praying for us from heaven when he has time in
between worship sessions.
Paul’s prayers are primarily centered on drawing believers into a deep
comprehension of all that Christ has accomplished for us through His
death and resurrection and a dynamic and intimate relationship with
God through the Holy Spirit. Therefore, Chapters 1 and 2 of this study
lay a foundation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the simplicity of pure
devotion to Him. The remaining chapters present a compilation of Paul’s
prayers for believers, for laborers, and for the lost, immersing us in Paul’s
way of calling and praying believers into the highest heights of wisdom
and spiritual understanding and the deepest depths of love and
submission to God and His purposes. The prayer teachings and example
of Jesus and some reference to Old Testament prayers are also woven into
this study in order to demonstrate the remarkable consistency of God
and to confirm Paul’s approach to prayer for God’s New Covenant
people. This said, I do not feel the need to over-scrutinize or dissect
Paul’s prayers ad nauseam but, rather, to present them in a way so as to
allow them to speak for themselves and so that the heart and purpose of
God is magnified.
The Aim of Our Charge is Love
Unfortunately, too often in the Church, believers seek to use prayer as a
method of turning God into their servant rather than the other way
around. Too many prayer teachings focus on how to get God to give us
what we want rather than listening to God so that we can give Him what
He wants. It seems habitual in the Church for prayer to be focused on
asking God to bless our plans rather than offering ourselves freely to align
with God’s will and His plans. Prayer is too frequently focused on our
circumstances and problems, the nations and politics, the lost and asking

3
 Aligning the Righteous with God

God to change those who aggravate us, or anyone or anything other than
the things that God may be seeking to prune, sift, change, or purify in our
own hearts. All of these things cause us to feel like we are diligently
communicating with God and serving Him when, all the while, we are
not actually receiving His love for us as His children, allowing Him to
renew our minds as His holy ones, or laying down our lives for Him as
His servants.
In contrast, the Apostle Paul said that the aim of our charge is love. (1
Timothy 1:5) This love in Greek is agape, meaning charity, unselfishness,
unconditional benevolence, and unceasing good will regardless of
circumstances and whether or not this love is returned. Indeed, this is the
purpose of the Christian life: to be conformed to the image of the Son of
God, Jesus Christ, who embodied perfect agape as the exact image of His
Father, God, who is love. (Romans 8:29; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3; 1
John 4:8) Jesus knew and trusted in the love and goodness of His Father
and willingly submitted Himself to God’s will for His life, no matter the
cost and no matter what man did to Him so that God’s eternal plan of
redemption could be fulfilled. (Isaiah 53:7; 1 Peter 2:23; Hebrews 12:3;
Philippians 2:1-8) Accordingly, the aim of this teaching is for you to
know the unfathomable love of God for you in Christ and the sufficiency
of His sacrifice on your behalf so that you willingly lay down your life,
your dreams, your plans, your preferences, your opinions, and your way
of doing things in order to walk in agape love, trust, and obedience to
God and His plans for your life.
If I haven’t lost your interest yet, then I invite you to join me in studying
Paul’s Prayers: Aligning the Righteous with God. May God the Father
draw you into the depths of His love, may Christ the Son be your
constant comfort and companion, and may the Holy Spirit give you
strength to endure and be transformed into the image of perfect love.