Insight for Living

Bill Meyer: When someone we love is suffering and we feel powerless to help, we'll often fill the silence with this promise: "I'll pray for you." Prayer isn't a last resort. Petitioning God for mercy should be our first step because it's our greatest weapon.

Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll explains why interceding for others is powerful and productive. And it's something that should spill freely from our hearts. It's how we tap into our God-given potential to make a difference. Today's message comes from Chuck's study in 2 Thessalonians called "Steadfast Christianity."

Chuck Swindoll: Robert Mulholland gives us this definition of prayer. "Prayer is the act by which the people of God become incorporated into the presence and action of God in the world. Prayer becomes a sacrificial offering of ourselves to God to become agents of God's presence and action in the daily events and situations of our lives."

While the Apostle Paul was earnestly preaching in Corinth, according to Acts 18:1-5, his dear Christian friends in Thessalonica were going through the wringer of persecution. How he wished he could do something, anything to help these believers he loved so much. It's tough to be somewhere else when those we care about are suffering, isn't it? Even when we're there, we often feel powerless to help them.

And somewhat apologetically we add, "I'll pray for you," feeling that somehow it's not enough, like it's our last resort. Nothing could be further from the truth. A.J. Gordon reminds us, "You can never do more than pray until you have prayed." Prayer is indeed our first priority and our most powerful means of helping others.

Why? Because in praying, we actively participate in what God is doing to bring about His will in that situation. We're co-laborers with God. In Mulholland's words, we become "change agents of God's presence and action in the daily events and situations of our lives." Paul recognized what a gift prayer is, and he modeled for us not only how to intercede for others but also how to give them new strength in the Lord so that His will is done.

To fully appreciate this privilege God has given us, let's get a handle on all that prayer is and what it does. We'll start by reading our text for today's message: 2 Thessalonians 1:11 and 12. That's right, just two verses. 2 Thessalonians chapter 1, verses 11 and 12.

"To this end also we pray for you always, that our God will count you worthy of your calling and fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus will be glorified in you, and you in Him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ."

Bill Meyer: You're listening to Insight for Living. To dig deeper into 2 Thessalonians on your own, be sure to purchase our "Searching the Scriptures" Bible study workbook by going to insight.org/offer. Chuck titled today's message "Praying for Others: A Must."

Chuck Swindoll: A major task of every preacher is to move people out of the realm of passivity into the realm of action. Sometime it seems like it takes years to move some people, and other times it's amazing how it can happen almost overnight. Sometime people turn from spectator to participant in a matter of seconds.

Reminds me of the story of a game warden named Jake and a fisherman named Sam. Jake was always amazed that Sam showed up at the end of the day with a couple or three stringers full of fish. This would be true even when all the other fishermen came back with only two or three fish.

Now, this particular lake was loaded with fish, but they seemed to elude the average fisherman, so there was no limit on number, only on size, and all of Sam's fish were big enough to bring home. The curiosity of the game warden finally got the best of him, and he said to Sam on one occasion, "I'd like to know your secret." Sam, a man of not too many words, said, "Show up tomorrow morning."

So the next morning, long before dawn, the game warden was there and Sam showed up with him, started the motor, 30-40 minutes later they were out in some secluded part of the lake. It was important to Sam that no one else be around. When they stopped the motor, everything was as still as it could be, and Jake decided to sit back, fold his arms, and watch Sam do his thing.

Sam reached down in his tackle box, pulled out a slender stick of dynamite, lit it, tossed it in the air, and about the time it hit the level of the lake, there was this enormous explosion. In a matter of seconds, fish of all sizes began to float up to the top of the lake, and without a word, Sam just began to row his way over and with his net, pick up the largest fish and string them.

You can imagine what Jake screamed. "Wait!" he said. "You break every rule in the book. I'm going to throw the book at you. You'll be paying a fine, I'm going to stick you in jail! How can you—" and about that time, Sam reached in his box and pulled out another stick of dynamite and he lit it and tossed it in Jake's lap and said, "You going to sit there watching all day or you going to fish?"

It's a great story. You know, it's amazing how you can move from spectator to participant in just a brief amount of time. If there were some way for me to drop my stick of dynamite in your lap today and get you as involved as I believe all of us could be and should be in the area of prayer, I would light the fuse in a second.

Because you see, the tragedy of any talk on prayer is that it will remain theoretical. Oh, it isn't that we don't believe in it. There won't be a person leaving, there won't be a person who stops listening who doesn't believe in these things. Prayer is as much a part of the Christian life as breathing is to physical life, but somehow getting the print off the page and into the mixture of experience is just almost impossible.

I don't believe I've ever met a Christian who was proud of his prayer life, even though I was proud to know them and really admired their prayer life on a few rare occasions. But most of us have to confess that what we believe the Bible says about prayer and what we do about it, well, there's kind of a world of difference.

I think it's not so much a matter of do I believe in prayer, but do I pray? Do I really, really pray? My desire is not to increase your guilt; I've never known of any lasting benefit of increasing people's guilt. My desire is to help you know that there awaits you a dynamic power that only you can tap in your sphere of influence. And all it takes is tapping it.

Some of you are growing old long before your years. Some of you have become wrinkled in the last several years over worry, mainly worry. You are busily engaged in complicating God's working because you won't take your hands off and leave it with Him in prayer. Oh, you say you let God work, you say you wait for God, but you don't.

My desire after this talk is that a few more people will be engaged in it and not simply folding their arms and watching people do it. Let me start with a definition. If I were given two words, I would say prayer is an invaluable discipline. It is a discipline, yes, but it is invaluable. You gain more five minutes in praying than you will five days of working.

You tap more power in one minute of praying than you will in one year of worrying. It is an invaluable discipline. It can take you across the street, it can take you across the state, it can get you across the seas in only a matter of thought, and you can be in someone else's shoes at that moment and representing them to God, and I don't know of another thing with that kind of power.

And the beauty of it is that God sits up and takes notice when we pray. He usually overlooks a lot of our working. A more accurate definition would be prayer is making a deliberate contact with God in word or thought. It's a deliberate contact. It isn't sort of a yawning, "I hope God is involved in this," or "take over, Lord," or some such casual thing.

It's a deliberate connection. A deliberateness about "Lord, this is the need," or "Lord, You are the object of this moment," or "Lord, this is where I am and Lord, it's Yours. Take charge, be glorified." I deliberately address You in this situation. I made a list of the ways we do that. We express our praise in prayer.

We confess our wrong. We request help; it's called petition. We declare our needs. We state our thanks. And we enter into someone else's world in what is called intercession, which is a major concern to me today. Hebrews 4:16 says that in prayer we draw near with confidence. James 1:5 says in prayer we gain wisdom. Matthew 7:7 and 8 say in prayer we ask, seek, knock, and find.

In Philippians 4, we release our anxiety. In Ephesians 6:18, after all of the armor is on, we are useless without prayer. We just are a lot heavier, a lot more cumbersome if we don't pray, having girded ourselves in the armor. Of interest to me in this preparation was a statement out of 1 Thessalonians 5 verse 17.

As soon as you get to this three-word verse, you will remember where it's found. You'll remember that you have even quoted it at times. 1 Thessalonians 5:17. "Pray without ceasing." Now, that's a strange statement. Our Lord is a realistic God; He doesn't expect us to walk about the day with our eyes closed and spending 24 hours a day in constant verbal prayer.

I like the way one man wrote it. "It doesn't mean you should go into a monastery or walk about with your hands folded and your eyes closed all day. It means rather to live with Christ in such a way that you can talk with Him or listen to Him at any moment. Oh, how wonderful it is to be driving along the road and see the scenery and to say, 'Lord, thank You for making something so beautiful as this.'"

"And the next sentence you can be talking about a truck that just passed perhaps. My wife and I do this all the time," he continues. "We see sheep in the field and we say, 'Lord, bless Miles and Jackie,' a couple of our friends we know who raise sheep. And then if we know a good joke, we may tell it, and we may thank God for a good sense of humor and the gift of laughter."

"Sure, in the morning or evening you have your fixed period of time when you spend it talking with the Lord and remembering certain causes, but you can talk with the Lord all day about a host of things that come up for He's right there with you. This is what it means to pray without ceasing." It means to live with Him every moment so that there's nothing between the soul and the Savior.

Someone asked a dear cleaning lady what her method of prayer was. I love her answer. "I don't know nothing about method, but I know a lots about prayer. When I pray, I just do this: I'm washing my clothes and I pray, 'Lord, wash my heart clean.' When I iron them later on, I pray, 'Lord, iron out all those troubles I can't do nothing about.'"

"When I sweep the floor, I say, 'Lord, sweep clean all the corners of my life.' That's praying without ceasing." Many of you are students, and you go through a day that's busy with assignments and responsibilities and deadlines and homework and reports and on and on. Your day can be literally filled with prayer without ever once having to close your eyes.

I'll never forget the first time it dawned on me that you could pray without closing your eyes. I was with a group of four other guys and we were traveling across the country and the fellow driving, it came his turn, and I was most concerned. And I have to confess, I peeked, and I'm glad to say he never closed his eyes when he prayed.

But as the most effective time on that entire trip, we just regularly communicated with our God. I learned a valuable lesson. It doesn't take a church, it doesn't take a cathedral, it doesn't take organ music, it doesn't even take a quiet place. It can happen in any place at any time for any reason. It's just making a deliberate contact with the living God and connecting Him with my world at that time for whatever may be the need.

Sometime I simply burst forth in song and I say, "That's for You, Lord. That's for You." Other times I can't even get words out and I weep, and that's for Him. He reads those thoughts. I'm grateful that it says "without ceasing." Doesn't give us any out, does it? The word means incessantly, relentlessly, this "without ceasing."

Someone has paraphrased it, "Pray with the fervency of a hacking cough." You've had the little tickle in your throat and it seem like you can't get your words out, breaking with a cough. That's the thought here. Just as a regular diet of your life, just regularly connecting with Him. Oh, what needs we often forfeit, oh, what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

I made a list of four of the reasons it's important, and I draw these four from about seven or eight different New Testament passages. Prayer refocuses my perspective. Without prayer, I only see in two dimensions; with prayer, I see a third dimension. Without prayer, I only see the visible; in prayer, I see the invisible.

God shows it to me in prayer. So prayer refocuses my perspective; it blows the dust off the lens of my life, and I'm able to see depth. Second, prayer quiets my fears and calms my nerves. I don't believe I have ever come from prayer nervous. I think I've always gone to prayer in the cases of needs and petition and intercession nervous and anxious, but I've never left prayer nervous.

Third, prayer transfers burdens. It takes the big load that I've been carrying and it shifts it to the shoulders that can handle that kind of weight. Prayer shifts or transfers the load. And fourth, this is what I want to talk about, prayer upholds others in need. Prayer takes other people's needs and pulls them away from my mind and heart and theirs and lifts them to the One who knows what's best.

Before we wind up in 2 Thessalonians 1, I have to have you look at Colossians 4 and verse 12. Here is an intercessor, a man you will hear very little about in your entire Christian life, but a man I wish we knew more about. Epaphras is his name. Colossians 4 and verse 12. "Epaphras, who is one of your number"—so he was of Colossae visiting with Paul at this time—he says he's a bondslave of Jesus Christ, sends you his greetings.

And look at what it says next about Epaphras: "Always laboring earnestly for you in his prayers." Put in the margin of your Bible, "intercession." Intercession occurs when I labor earnestly for someone in prayer. At the root of this Greek word is the English transliterated term agony. He *agonizomai* in prayer for you.

He goes into great labor as he takes the burdens that you're living with and he shifts them through his lips, his mind, his tongue, his throat as he shifts them to God in prayer. I don't normally announce my prayer list, but I thought it would be of interest to let you know how I fish, how I pray, what things I concern myself with, and I've just taken a random sampling of this past week, in fact, only five days of this past week.

Our older daughter, who is halfway along in her pregnancy, had to have surgery. I had to represent her to God in prayer. I couldn't handle that kind of pressure. I want a healthy and joyful daughter who has no pain, but that's not God's plan. I want a grandbaby who will not be affected by the surgery, and I can't reach in and do that amazing magic.

I can't protect the child through the surgery. So I prayed for Charissa. A close friend of ours and a board member of our church experienced a sad thing this week as his wife had a stroke, and I prayed for him. I couldn't change the effect of all of that, but I found myself engaged in a powerful moment when I called his name and her name to God in prayer.

I have a pastor friend whose ministry has been expanded and he's facing some very critical things on the horizon and he doesn't know how to handle them, and he called me. And I prayed over the phone with him. That, by the way, is another wonderful discipline that most Christians don't engage in.

Have a good friend who does that with me on a regular basis. Before I can hang up, he'll say, "Wait, wait, Chuck, let me just pray right now." And here I am on the phone, connected in that marvelous triangle as he represents me in that particular thing I've mentioned in prayer. Well, I did that with this pastor friend.

Another man has waited all of his adult life to talk to his father about his salvation. And he said, "This is the week, Chuck, I'm going to do it. 11 o'clock," and he gave me the day, gave me the time. He says, "You pray." So I prayed for him as he spoke with his father about eternal life.

Longtime mentor of mine who lived on the East Coast was killed in a car accident. And I, after grieving, prayed for his widow and wrote her, telling her of my intercession for her and for her extended family. Another friend was chosen to lead the Navigators as the leadership changes, and I pray that God would prepare him from this time until that moment when he takes over the leadership of that organization that has over 2,000 people on the payroll, people in the personnel, and people who represent the Navs all around the world. Prayed for him.

That's just a few things from my life. But you just have watched me fish. Just a theoretical thing if what I do gets results and you just watch it. I want that stick of dynamite to land in your lap. I want you to see, this is a way to do it! This will work! And what you say and how you go about it and the manner in which you address the Father is up to you, but fish! Pray!

Stop studying about prayer, stop giving people prayer requests, pray! I don't mean never do that, but don't do it as a substitute. Pray! Connect! Make it a daily part of your life before your feet ever hit the floor, you're in prayer. You get up and you look at that face, you'll be in prayer that morning for your life.

And you get into the day, you'll be in prayer as your day gets going and you'll find it's the most normal way in the world to do things that are boring like driving and the constant part of your job that everybody has boring, connect with it, spice it up with prayer. Marvelous what could happen.

And by the way, when you make your list, leave room for an answer in your list. You'll be happy to know my daughter's home and doing fine. The baby is great. I think they pumped oxygen in there and he probably thought air conditioning had been turned on. He just terrific.

I want you to know that the guy who said, "Pray for me when I talk to my dad," led him to Christ and he did cartwheels almost in my study. He did it, he did it, he did it! I bounced through my door, it was unbelievable. And I was connected with that whole thing. I prayed for him at 11 o'clock. I'm confident that God is going to work in each one of these cases, and that's part of the answer, it's going to happen.

Bill Meyer: Those two answered prayers—a daughter home and healthy, a father brought to faith—were not coincidences. They were the fruit of someone who stopped studying about prayer and simply prayed. That's the invitation Chuck Swindoll extends to you today: not a new method, not a longer quiet time, just a deliberate, daily, persistent connection with the living God.

We're just getting started in Chuck Swindoll's study of 2 Thessalonians. It's a series he's calling "Steadfast Christianity." And there's much more to this letter from Paul that Chuck wants to show us, so please keep listening through the entire eight-part series. Insight for Living has created a brand-new "Searching the Scriptures" Bible study workbook for 2 Thessalonians. This spiral-bound resource is available right now by going to insight.org/offer.

One of the themes that Paul weaves into his letter to the Thessalonians is leadership. Paul poured his life into a small band of believers in Thessalonica, mentoring them, challenging them, and refusing to let them settle for anything less than God's best. That's what great leaders do.

And today we're offering a book that will inspire you to lead in whatever capacity God has called you to, whether that's at home, at church, or in the workplace. Few stories in all of Scripture illustrate effective leadership more powerfully than the story of Nehemiah.

Chuck Swindoll's classic book, *Hand Me Another Brick*, draws timeless principles from Nehemiah's remarkable rebuilding of Jerusalem's wall—principles that are just as vital for today's pastor, ministry leader, board member, teacher, or anyone who has a role leading others. You can request your copy when you send a generous gift to Insight for Living. It's our gift to you.

Chuck's book on Nehemiah is a rich, readable journey through one of the Bible's greatest leadership stories. Once again, it's called *Hand Me Another Brick*. You can make a donation and request the book by writing to us at Insight for Living, Post Office Box 5000, Frisco, Texas, 75034. Or call us at 1-800-772-8888. And the book is available online when you visit insight.org/donate.

I'm Bill Meyer. Chuck Swindoll explains the power and privilege of praying for others tomorrow on Insight for Living.

The preceding message, "Praying for Others: A Must," was copyrighted in 1986, 1991, 2002, 2024, and 2026, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2026 by Charles R. Swindoll Incorporated. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.