I'm far too often guilty of praying small prayers. I pray for things like a good day, a smooth conversation with someone, thank God for the food. I don't think these are bad prayers in and of themselves, but when put next to Paul's prayers, sometimes they look like BB pellets next to nuclear bombs.
This is Paul's first prayer in Ephesians:
¹⁶I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, ¹⁷that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, ¹⁸having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, ¹⁹and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might ²⁰that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, ²¹far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. ²²And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, ²³which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
With this peek into Paul's prayer life, he's writing down what he prays for the Ephesians when he remembers them. It's raising the curtain on what he thinks God can do and what he thinks they need.
Paul has a nuclear grasp of people's needs. He sees that they need to know the hope that God has called them towards, the meaning of being God's people, and the greatness of God's power that is working toward us. He isn't praying for a change in their circumstances, or for a meeting of their material needs, or for the success of a particular endeavor. Granted, we hold these things to God in prayer. It was after all Paul who, in his letter to the Philippians, urges us to let all our requests be made known to God with prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. What I think Paul urges and models is that as we grasp that all things are under the feet of Jesus, we realize that our material concerns are safely in the hands of Jesus, but our greater concern is to grasp exactly how much things are safely in the hands of Jesus.
Paul also has a nuclear grasp of God's power. God's power is not simply limited to small interventions in people's lives, adjusting a knee here, healing a cold there, giving someone a good day, helping people have the courage to share the gospel today ... God's power is able to alter people's reality, to give them a supernatural knowledge.
When we were looking at this passage in our SMUCF small groups' team training (where we study the passage the small groups team will go on to facilitate a study on), we were initially confused if this passage was primarily asking the Ephesians to know certain things or to pray to know these things. It felt like Paul was spelling out what the Ephesians needed to know rather explicitly, and so the "answer" to his prayer was that the Ephesians would work hard on knowing these things. But as we looked harder at the passage, it became clearer that these are no ordinary facts to regurgitate. These are things that they can only know by the Spirit giving them knowledge of God himself, knowledge that isn't just an improved memory but an enlightenment of the eyes of their hearts, and things so wonderful, glorious, and paradigm-shifting that one does not simply "know" these things, but has a necessary emotional and decisional shift. Who can really be the same if they have a firm hope of this gigantic cosmos under the throne of Jesus, and a confidence that God treasures and looks forward to inheriting them, and a realization that a resurrection power is working towards them? And so I think some of us in that room started to grasp that we don't quite grasp these things, and that we need to humbly ask God to help us to know these things too.
It is a nuclear grasp of people's needs, with a nuclear grasp of God's power, that brings Paul to pray nuclear prayers.
