Pray with Eternity in View

PRAY WITH ETERNITY IN VIEW

In his book, Praying with Paul,New Testament scholar D. A. Carson says, “If what we highly cherish belongs to the realm of heaven, our hearts and minds will incline to heaven and all its values, but if what we highly cherish belongs to the realm of earth and the merely transitory, our hearts and minds will incline to the merely transitory. After all, the Master himself taught us that our hearts will run to where our treasure lies (Matt. 6:19-21).”

I would add that we will never pray rightly until we pray with eternity in view. When the focus of our lives is on this life only, our prayers will be focused primarily on this life. But when our hearts are set on what will matter a hundred, a thousand, and a million years from now, we will pray for things that will matter forever. For example, we will ask God to make the hearts of believers blameless and holy at the coming of our Lord Jesus (1 Thes 3:13), that the name of our Lord Jesus will be glorified by believers (2 Thes. 1:12), or that believers be “filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him, bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:9-10).

Furthermore, keeping eternity in view will keep us praying in the hard times when we can scarcely see the way before us. Carson tells the story of how in 1952 Florence Chadwick determined to swim from Catalina Island to the shore of mainland California. She had already become the first woman to swim the English Channel both ways. The weather was foggy the day she set out, so much so she could barely even see the boats accompanying her.  For the next fifteen hours she swam until at last the journey became too much for her and she begged to be taken out of the water. Despite repeated encouragements from her trainer, Chadwick finally gave up, utterly exhausted both physically and emotionally.  She was pulled from the water only a half mile from shore.

The next day at a news conference she confessed that if she could have only seen the shore she believed she could have made it.

Two months later she proved her point by successfully completing the distance.

Pray with eternity in view and you will keep praying despite the fog.

So we must not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up (Col. 6:9 HCSB).