. . . AND PRAY
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The final instruction Paul gave to the Ephesian believers was to pray. “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Ephesians 6:18).
Prayer of all kinds and for all things was prescribed as the all-over covering—the final piece—of the armor God had given to His people.
Not only were they to pray for individual Christians, but prayer was a way in which they could add to the strength and courage of “all the Lord’s people.” Even if we do not fully understand how it works, Paul insisted that prayer matters and that we can make an important contribution to the lives and faith of others by praying for them.
And this was the request he made of the Ephesian believers.
As with the first disciples in the book of Acts (see Acts 4:29), prayer was not so much for protection and safety but for courage to meet the challenges, stand up to the threats, and be able to continue to share the message of Jesus boldly.
It seems likely that Paul had his potential court date before Caesar on his mind. He asked the Ephesian believers to pray for the words that he would speak, but also that he would “declare it fearlessly.” Neither history nor the Bible reports the confrontation between Paul and Nero, who was Caesar at the time Paul was in Rome.
But we can expect that the Ephesians’ prayers for Paul’s fearlessness would have been answered—as the mystery of the gospel was proclaimed by one of its most courageous ambassadors in the world’s most powerful court within a generation of Jesus’ crucifixion on the fringe of the empire.
