DAY 2
Pray with Thanksgiving to the Father

‘For this reason, ever since I [Paul] heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.’ Ephesians 1:15-16 NIV

Today, let’s remind ourselves of some prayer fundamentals.

We start prayer with thanksgiving. The basis for ‘giving thanks’ is a reference back to all the spiritual blessings that we’ve been given in Christ – hence the phrase, ‘For this reason’. Paul gives specific thanks here for what he has heard about the believers in Ephesus – their ‘faith in the Lord Jesus’ and their ‘love for all the saints.’ This is a great pattern for us too! Let’s thank God for what He has done for us in Christ and for what He is doing in our lives – both individually and in our church family.

We’re also to pray persistently. Notice the language used here: ‘I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers’. Just as Paul prayed persistently for the believers, he encourages us to do the same. As we do so, let’s remind ourselves who it is we’re praying to: ‘the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father’.

Note that we pray to a Father who is willing. We don’t come to any god but to a personal and loving Father God, who knows our needs and wants to answer our right requests – both our own and those we pray on behalf of others. This God is both ‘our Father’ and ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Because we are in Christ and due to our spiritual adoption, we share in the relationship that Jesus has with His Father, and Jesus is now our elder brother. What a privileged place we have in our new family and before the throne of God. We are not guests visiting but family who belong there, and the Father says to us, ‘Help yourselves’! This means that as we come to God in prayer, we can come with boldness, knowing that He is a Father willing to answer our prayers. We can ‘keep asking’ for His Spirit to bring revelation and transformation in our lives and the lives of those we are praying for.

But there is a second dimension of the confidence we can have in prayer, and it’s that God is also able. Not only is He described as ‘the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ but also as ‘the glorious Father’ or better translated ‘Father of glory’ (ESV). The ‘glory’ of God refers to the splendour, brightness, and power of His divine presence. This is surely Paul’s way of reminding himself and us that we pray to a Father ‘of glory,’ who is perfectly able to answer our prayers out of His limitless resources.