What do your prayers reveal about you?

When the Apostle Paul was in prison in Rome, he prayed constantly, not necessarily about the things you'd expect.

Today on Truth For Life, we'll explore the pattern and priority of Paul's prayers in his letter to the Ephesians.

Alistair Begg is teaching a message he's titled, I Bounce My Knee.

I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family or the whole family in heaven and on earth is named.

That according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being.

So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,

and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever.

Amen.

Now Father, as we turn to the Bible again, we acknowledge our entire dependence upon the work of the Holy Spirit, to illumine the page to us, to clarify our thinking, to instill within as a genuine hunger for your Word,

the ability to understand and believe and obey it. And we pray humbly in Christ's name, amen.

Well, we pick up our studies here at the 14th verse and turn to the second of Paul's prayers that is contained here in this letter to the Ephesians.

If it's true to say, and I think it is, that our conversation with others in public declares what is on our minds, then I think it's also true to say that our conversation with God in private almost inevitably reveals what is on our hearts.

So we listen to ourselves talk or we listen to others talk and we get an inkling of at least the kind of thinking that is going on.

When we hear ourselves pray or when we are in the company of others who lead us in prayer, then not only do we understand what is taking place in their minds intellectually,

but also something of what is going on in the very center of their being. Because remember when the Bible speaks about our hearts, it's not talking simply in emotional terms, but rather our hearts as the seat of our mind and of our emotions and of our will.

And I begin that way because in the way that our money and our time and its use reveals something of our priorities, so to do our prayers.

And that is certainly true when we read the prayers that are contained for us in the Bible and not least of all the prayers of Paul.

Back in chapter 1, he had already prayed beginning in verse 16 and 17 concerning those who were under his care that they would have a spirit of wisdom and revelation that their eyes would be enlightened and so on.

And once again, we are taken as it were behind the scenes, the context of Paul writing this letter is confinement in Rome.

He may well have been chained to a soldier. He was in a form of house arrest, but nevertheless he wasn't free to come and go.

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