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Last week we noted the priority the apostle Paul puts upon prayer in the life the church. It is to be the first work of the church. Or, as Stott puts it, the church is to be essentially a "worshipping, praying community" in the midst of a world that doesn't know God.
But Paul was not only concerned that the church should pray. He was also vitally concerned about the scope of its prayers. It was to be worldwide in its prayer interests. "I urge then, first of all" he wrote to Timothy, "that requests, prayers intercession, and thanksgiving be made for everyone..." (1 Timothy 2:1). Later he goes on to explain why the church should embrace the whole world in its prayers, namely, because of God's saving purpose for the whole world. "This is good and pleases God our Saviour," the apostle writes, "who wants all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth" (v. 4). As Stott puts it, "It is because God's desire and Christ's death concern everybody that the church's prayers and proclamation must concern everybody too" (p. 60).
Leaving aside the practical difficulty (impossibility) of praying literally for every single person in the world, Paul's point is very clear. The church is to have a global concern for the kingdom of God and progress of the gospel. It is not to be so bound up with its personal interests that it never intercedes for anything beyond the immediate needs of its own members.
Yet sadly, that often happens. Stott recalls attending worship in a certain church where the pastoral prayer on that occasion comprised of just two requests: "that the pastor might enjoy a good vacation (which was fine), and that two lady members of the congregation might be healed (which was also fine; we should pray for the sick)." He goes on to say, "But that was all. The intercession can hardly have lasted thirty seconds. I came away saddened, sensing that this church worshipped a little village god of their own devising. There was no recognition of the needs of the world, and no attempt to embrace the world in prayer" (p. 61).
I fear the situation is even worse than that is some churches. Pastoral or intercessory prayer seems to be fast disappearing. It doesn't fit well in the highly personal, subjectively- orientated approach of much of today's worship.
It is no different in our own lives. Self-centredness - our heritage from the Fall - has a way of shrinking the range of our prayer interests. It is true, is it not, that we often pray for little more than our own personal needs? Paul is urging us here to break out of that small, suffocating sphere of interest and to engage ourselves in a concern for the whole of God's world. And he is telling us that the way for that to happen is to get a God-centred focus on life - a focus that absorbs itself with what pleases God and with what he is doing to save sinners.
John Stott is surely on target when he says, "I sometimes wonder whether the comparatively slow progress towards peace and justice in the world, and towards world evangelization, is due more than anything else to the prayerlessness of the people of God... What might not happen if God's people throughout the world learned to wait upon him in believing, persevering prayer" (p. 62). What might happen indeed!