Why Pray For Every Person?

Our tendency is to pray for things that immediately concern us, or the people in our inner circle. But we have not prayed our best if we have merely prayed for ourselves and those close to us.

How widely should you pray? Many are finding that God is inviting them to launch into an adventure of praying for everyone throughout their neighborhood, or their workplace, or even entire communities. Praying beyond yourself with careful concern for everyone in a particular setting is called saturation prayer.

Saturation prayer is rarely something that happens spontaneously. Usually there is intentional planning and teamwork. In order to do something which requires this kind of forethought and follow-through, it's critical to have a firm grasp of why it's worth doing at all. Just why should we spend the hours it will take to plan, to mobilize those who will pray, and of course, to actually do the praying for every person?

1. Pray for every person because scripture calls us to do it as a matter of top priority.
"First of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all people....This is good and pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:1-4).

"First of all" means that it's a top priority. It's not a requirement or a command. Failure to pray for every person is not a matter of moral wrongdoing. Saturation prayer is not the right thing to do (as opposed to wrong or sinful things). It is instead one of the best and most precious things to do because of what God finds delightful and desirable (see verse 3 of 1 Timothy 2). God's desires and purposes encompass every single person. He desires all people to be saved. God's word urges us to expand our prayers to match God's heart.

2. Pray for every person because God is working to advance His purpose in every person's life.
God is advancing His purposes in every person's life. They may seem to you to be far from God, like an abandoned sheep, frightened, lost, and ravaged by evil. But they are considered sheep who are lost to God. Jesus reveals God's passion for every person. God has a heart of a shepherd, always thinking of every single person.

"What do you think? If any man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go and search for the one that is straying?" (Matthew 18:12).

We would have never known Jesus' way of seeing people if He hadn't described it, but on one occasion, when surrounded on a throng of people, He told his followers how He saw people.

"Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd" (Matthew 9:36).

Jesus felt compassion for them, but it's important to notice that Jesus did not call for action based on His feelings of compassion. In order to describe what action was required, He changed the metaphor from lost sheep to an unfulfilled harvest.

"Then He said to His disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.'"

The image of harvest is not intended to suggest that ripe fields are being wasted. Despite many sermons to the contrary, Jesus is not suggesting that God can't get any help or that somehow that the harvest will fail for lack of human effort. Attention is brought instead to the Lord of the harvest. God Himself has implanted something worthy and wonderful in the soil of the people and the society. There is something He finds precious that He has nurtured and guarded. He wills to bring home the fruit of changed lives that pleases Him. And thus Jesus calls His followers to pray that God will do something that they cannot.

Jesus is not an activist or an opportunist. He instead recognizes that there is something that God has started and advanced which He will bring to fulfillment. The prayer is for God to finish what He's begun. As Ed Silvoso has often said, nothing is wrong with the harvest. God has brought that to a ripe moment. The laborers are few. But it is God's work to send laborers as well.

The point is this: That God is watching and working in every person's life. But God loves to work in accordance with the prayers of His people. At special moments He longs to hear the prayers of His people calling upon Him to finish what He has begun, bringing about an ingathering.

3. Pray for every person because it glorifies God.
Jesus said, "Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son" (John 14:13). When you pray, God chooses how and when He will act. Prayers are never automatic. Prayer is not a mechanism or a mere technique of leveraging heaven's compliance with your desires. God is always wiser and greater than our best prayers. But He loves to answer our prayers, no matter how confused they may be. And this is why: He is honored, revealed, praised and glorified when He answers prayer.

Prayer makes God's hand evident. Prayer makes God public. He can be thanked to the extent that He has been requested. Prayer could be God's favorite way of being glorified. That's why He's stimulating so many of His followers to carefully pray for every person in their cities or other relational settings. It's God's way of setting Himself up for glory as never before.

When we pray for every person in an area and as those people come to learn that they are being prayed for, God will almost always be looked to and honored as never before. For those who love God, such glory really matters.

4. Pray for every person because it changes us.
One pastor said of prayerwalking throughout his city: "We would do this even if God didn't answer the prayers." Why? "Because it changes us. We start seeing with His eyes. We start feeling with His heart." And then he quickly added, "And we are seeing God answer many prayers. But we would prayerwalk our city even if we didn't because I haven't seen anything else that will change us to have his heart like this."

People who pray into the story of what God is doing in people's lives with persistence find themselves moved with wholesome compassion, like Jesus. Steady prayer focused on God's purposes will infuse an attitude and conviction of hope.

Love without hope usually sours into pity. No one wants to be pitied. But if our love is fused with vibrant, prayer-shaped hope for others, we will find ourselves yearning effortlessly for their best interests. We will find ourselves viewing them with a dignity deriving from the awesome prospects of God's work in their lives coming to completion.

Faith without hope usually shrivels into selfishness. No one who prays likes to think of them self as selfish, but unless faith is mingled with expectant, kingdom-sized hope for others, usually our faith turns inward. We find ourselves believing for personal things. Not too much later we find ourselves struggling to believe even for our personal affairs. How crucial it is that our love and our faith are focused with huge, God-sized hope for others.

The only way to nourish hope is to pray according to God's kingdom-sized purposes in the lives of others.

Those who pray for others find themselves prepared with a wealth of insight and concern for those they are praying for. When those who pray find themselves interacting with those for whom they pray, their conversation is filled with wisdom and sensitivity. It's not hard to figure out how such winsome wisdom is formed. Hope-focused praying develops a courageous kindness and a supernatural rapport.