Grow Our Hearts: Prayers for the World

How do you decide what to pray for? Think about your answer for a moment…

My guess is that you decide what to pray for based on what concerns you. That is how I decide. And I don’t mean “what concerns you” as specifically things that worry you, but in the more general sense of concern—things that touch your life, that feel close to home. 

In other words, we tend to pray according to the things we care about, that feel personal to us.

This is not unbiblical. In Matthew Chapter 6, we see Jesus give instruction on how we should pray. As the prayer progresses, it feels very close to home and covers the range of our cares from our physical sustenance to our spiritual well-being. It hits very close to home. It is important to remember, however, that it is not an individual prayer, but a communal prayer which, though specific enough to ask that God provide the food we need today, is also sweeping enough to ask that God establish his rule and authority on earth, in our world, with the same certainty that it is established in heaven. In other words, the way we were taught to pray pretty much covers all the bases and goes well beyond my cares alone.

And yet the question remains, how do you decide what to pray for? Or more to the point, how do we, Summit Church, decide what to pray for? Believe it or not, that has not always been a super easy question to answer, especially when the context is our corporate worship services. For years, our default framework for whether or not we should pray for some specific global concern in our worship services basically came down to two factors.

Does it feel close to home? Are people coming to our service needing or expecting prayer for this thing?  

Or is it of a scale that touches our collective consciousness, even if it may not feel personal or deeply connected?

Those criteria, which are basically mirrors of how we often filter our prayers personally, are not invalid, but they may be incomplete. They may not be as personal as the latter parts of the Lord’s Prayer but miss asking that God establish his kingdom in its fullness or manifest his will in our world with as much authority as it is in heaven. If I only pray for the things that concern me, then I may over time default to think that what concerns God is limited to the range of my caring. I may forget that if it concerns someone else, if it hits close to home for them, then it concerns the God who loves them and who wants his kingdom established in their world just as he desires the same in my world.

Remember that the Lord’s Prayer was spoken in the plural. It wasn’t just a prayer for my life, my concerns, but for our lives, our concerns. The Lord’s Prayer expands our horizons to include heaven and earth, while not neglecting our immediate needs. 

I would suggest that when we pray beyond the things that hit closest to home, we train our hearts to see the world as God does; to validate the cares and concerns of others, not because we inherently share them as our own, but rather that we have a share in them because they matter to God. In praying on the heaven-and-earth scale that Jesus taught, we allow God to grow our hearts beyond the confines of our immediate relational, emotional, or circumstantial horizons. 

In that spirit, we are beginning a monthly element in our worship services that we are calling “prayers for the world.” This communal time of guided prayer during our worship services will be intentionally built to have us pray for the things that hit close to home for us as well as the things that hit close to the home of another—to pray for the daily bread of another even as I pray for my own. I recognize that we will not be able to pray for everything big and small that deserves prayer, but am confident that as we grow our concerns to a God-sized scale, our hearts will grow as a result and our corporate prayers will shape how we pray as individuals.  

We should not underestimate what this means for us or misunderstand how this will stretch and grow us. Remember that when we pray on the scale of what concerns God it is going to be uncomfortable, and incredible. It means we pray for the other, for the over there, for the abused and the abuser, the exploited and the exploiter, the persecuted and the persecutor. It means we pray that God’s will is manifest on both sides of the tracks, across the range of political and social bastions, for the poor and for the rich. We pray for it all and are transformed.

Gone are the days of limiting our prayers to only our concerns, or only the events of a scale that grabs our attention. And in a holy irony, as we do that, we invite the concerns of another to be our own, and we recognize that all brokenness in our world is always of a scale that matters to God. As the distant becomes close, more personal, then what hits close to home for me and you expands over time. We still pray for what we care about, but we have trained ourselves to care on a scale that more properly reflects the heart of God. Our “ours” become bigger.

John Parker is the lead pastor at Summit Church. He enjoys woodworking and boats and dreams of building his own boat in the coming years.