“Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, through our Lord Jesus Christ and through the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in prayers to God on my behalf. Pray that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, that my ministry to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints, and that, by God’s will, I may come to you with joy and be refreshed together with you. May the God of peace be with all of you. Amen.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Jesus’ brother, James wrote in his letter that part of the reason we don’t receive from God all that we could is that we don’t pray for it. We don’t ask for it. The fact is that our prayers are usually small. We ask for people we know to get well or have an easier time dealing with one physical issue or another. And that’s about it. Those aren’t bad prayers, but they aren’t necessarily kingdom-advancing prayers. Paul here is asking for prayer from the believers in Rome. Let’s talk about why he places so much emphasis on this, the kinds of things he is asking them to pray for, and what this all might mean for us.

The last thing a person writes is often the most important. There’s a reason we put so much emphasis on a person’s last will and testament. A deathbed confession is considered not only admissible in court, but a highly reliable piece of testimony. One of the basic principles I learned in seminary for interpreting the Scriptures and especially stories in the Scriptures is to pay attention to the final stress – that is, the final thing an author writes – because that is usually where the point of the story is going to become the clearest.

So, here at the end of this section and nearly at the end of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, our interpretive radar should be up and paying close attention to the thing Paul considered to be toward the top of the pile in terms of its importance to his overall point. Paul writes, “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, through our Lord Jesus Christ and through the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me…”

Pause there for just a second. That’s a pretty big setup to whatever he is going to say next. He’s not just asking them something. This isn’t just a favor. He’s asking this of them in Jesus’ name and with all the power of the Holy Spirit behind the request. And he doesn’t just want them to chip in modestly to whatever it is either. He wants them to strive for it. He’s asking them to be willing to put some major effort toward whatever this is going to be. Now, he’s not asking them to do it alone. He’s going to be in it with them.

So what is this thing that Paul has put so much emphasis on to have the Roman believers join him in doing? “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, through our Lord Jesus Christ and through the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in prayers to God on my behalf.” In other words, he’s asking them to pray for him. That’s it? That’s Paul’s big request here at the end? Not put all of this into action? Not commit yourselves all the more to the Gospel? Not give to this or that offering? It’s just to pray? Absolutely! And this isn’t a “just” kind of request either. This really is a big deal.

Paul understood where the power to do any of the things he was doing came from, and it wasn’t him. He understood that in order to do the things of God, you have to have the blessing of God going out ahead of you, right along beside you, and coming up behind you. He knew that he was not and could not act alone in his efforts to advance the Gospel. He also understood, though, that because our God isn’t limited to a single place, the support He gives to His people to do the work He has called them to do doesn’t have to be limited to a single place. Paul believed wholeheartedly that the greatest single weapon we have in our fight against the forces of this world is prayer. Prayer both connects us to the power of God, but it also connects us through the Spirit of God to one another such that support can be offered in meaningful, critical ways even when we aren’t in the same location together.

This means that when you have someone in need in one place, you can recruit fellow believers to pray in another place and those efforts are not wasted. As members of Christ’s body, the church, which although existing in distinct local bodies all over the world is nonetheless one single body in Him, we can pray for the work of our fellow brothers and sisters all over the world and know that our labors in the Lord are not in vain.

Make this more personal. When you are in need, it’s okay for you to ask people to pray for you. I hear a lot of prayer requests as a pastor. When we gather for Bible study on Wednesday nights in my church, we start by sharing prayer requests with one another. We have a prayer group through a communication app with more than 100 people in it. Prayer requests are regularly shared there followed by many affirmations that the group is praying over them. For all these requests, though, the vast majority of them are for someone else. People rarely ask for prayer for themselves.

The reasons for this make sense even though none of them are actually any good. We don’t want to be seen as in need. Needing prayer is an indication of weakness, and we don’t want other people to think we are weak. We want to be seen as strong, as someone to come to for prayer, but not as one who needs prayer ourselves. We want people to think we have it altogether. Our image matters more than honesty and genuine vulnerability.

Also, we are perhaps ashamed of our weaknesses and points of brokenness. If we need prayer for a relationship, for instance, then to ask for prayer means that we have to acknowledge to someone else that our relationship is not what it should be. Perhaps we’ll ask for prayer when a relationship has gotten to the point of major crisis, but before then, we assure ourselves that we can solve our issue just fine on our own. We’ll ask God for help, and that’ll be enough.

But that’s not how God designed the body to work. He designed us to be one body together, sharing in the labor of proclaiming and advancing His kingdom. If one member of the body is weak, the whole body suffers for and with it. If one member of the body is weak and hides that weakness from the rest of the body for reasons of pride and shame, then the whole body is facing a ticking time bomb that will eventually explode. When the whole body is filled with these ticking time bombs, the amount of actual kingdom-advancing work the body can do becomes severely limited. Paul’s instinct to ask for prayer and to indicate the great priority it had for him was exactly right.

As for what Paul asked them to pray for, there are three things. The first is that “I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea.” Note carefully here that Paul isn’t necessarily asking for physical safety. He’s asking for rescue. That implies he knew he would fall into their hands in the first place. That was going to come with a certain amount of harm to his person. He had accepted that was going to be part of this journey. His prayer was that once that had happened that he would be rescued.

That’s perhaps something we should pay attention to more carefully than we might otherwise. We talked before about the kind of situation Paul was walking into in Jerusalem. He knew this was the case. He was aware of the intentions of his enemies. Following God’s plans may bring with it a certain amount of unavoidable physical risk. It’s okay to pray about that, but our primary concern shouldn’t be our own safety, but rather the advance of God’s kingdom. Depending on precisely where Paul was when he wrote this letter he either already had or would soon receive a word of prophecy regarding the situation that faced him when he arrived in Jerusalem. It wasn’t going to be good. So, he was asking for prayer before he got there so that foundation would already be in place when he walked into town. And, as a bonus here, we know from Luke’s narrative in Acts that this prayer was answered. God did indeed rescue him from the unbelievers in Jerusalem. Paul survived the trip and made it to Rome.

The second thing he requested them to pray for was “that my ministry to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints.” In spite of the dangers that were facing him, Paul’s greater concern was that his ministry in Jerusalem was effective and successful. I think we can understand this request in two different ways. He wanted prayer that his labors would be fruitful, that he would minister to them well. He also wanted prayer that they would be willing to receive his ministry. He wanted their hearts prepared so that they were willing to receive what the Spirit had to give through him.

The third thing was “that, by God’s will, I may come to you with joy and be refreshed together with you.” He wanted to see the Roman believers. This was something he had already expressed to them. Coming back to this was kind of a capstone to this section. This was just something Paul wanted. This was going to advance God’s kingdom, yes, but it wasn’t Paul’s core mission. That was to get to Spain and to proclaim the Gospel where it had not yet been heard. Seeing the Romans was just bonus. But let’s not overlook the fact that Paul asked for it anyway. It’s okay to pray for things we want and to ask other people to join us in praying for them as well. The only caveat here is that the things we want should be in line with the things God wants; with things that will advance His kingdom.

And I think that is the tie that binds all three of these prayer requests from Paul. These were kingdom-advancing prayer requests. Paul sought rescue from his enemies so that he could continue doing the work God was sending him to Jerusalem to do. He wanted prayer for his work that it would be received well by those to whom it was going to be directed. And he wanted to be able to see the people who were praying for him so that they could both be encouraged to continue the work of advancing God’s kingdom. These are the kinds of prayers that are worth praying. They are the kinds of prayers God will answer. And again, we know that God did indeed answer all of them.

The application here, then, isn’t that we should be praying (although we certainly should). The application here is twofold: Do you have people who are praying for you and with you for the advance of God’s work in and through your life? You need that group if you don’t have it. You need a group of people with whom you can share all of your prayer requests and not just the sanitized ones you typically share in large and more impersonal group settings. You need people with whom you can be honest about your prayer needs and who will join you in praying over them. If you don’t have that group, you need to start doing the work to get it. Your ministry won’t be nearly as effective without it.

The second thing is this: Are you praying and inviting others to join you in praying for kingdom-advancing things? Do you ever get past your list of who’s hurt or sick? If not, it may be worthwhile to call a halt on praying for sick people for a while. God cares about them, and it’s okay to pray for them, but only when we are praying for them in kingdom-advancing ways. And, just so we are clear, restored physical health isn’t necessarily a kingdom-advancing gift from God. Focus your prayers and your prayer requests on things that will advance God’s kingdom if they are granted. These kinds of prayers are far more likely to be answered, and when they are, they will indeed advance God’s kingdom which is the goal. Right? Let’s get to praying in ways that God intended for us.