Verse of the day · October 11

Why does the armour passage in Ephesians 6 end with praying for all saints?

The soldier is told to pray for Christians in countries he will never see.

Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints;
Ephesians 6:18

Paul is writing from prison, near the end of his letter to the Ephesians, and he lists six things one at a time: a belt, a breastplate, boots, a shield, a helmet, and a sword. They are the kit of an ancient soldier, and a man who had all six of them was completely armed. Each one stands for something a Christian is to carry in its place, and the last of them, the sword, is the word of God. The fight is not merely with other men. The opposition is the powers of darkness, and enemies set on keeping the armed man from God and heaven. Then one more instruction arrives, and it is to pray. It is the one item with no piece of a soldier's kit matched to it, which is why it can be read as what the armed man does once he is dressed, rather than as a seventh thing to wear. Greek and Roman armies had a custom before they engaged: they offered prayers to their gods for success. The soldier in the letter is pointed the same way, though not to gods of that kind. He is told to depend on God, who commands him and who alone can save.

Read the other way, prayer is the last item in the armour itself. Either reading gives it the same job: it is what buckles the other six on. Without it a man may be completely armed, and skilled, and brave, and still be certain of defeat, because God alone gives the victory. The sword can be in his hand and do nothing for him: nobody wields it rightly without constant prayer.

The verse then takes the praying apart, word by word, and always is the first of them. In the Greek it means in every season — whenever there is an opportunity to pray, and whenever there is a need. It rules out three habits: not praying at all; praying for a while and then dropping it; keeping prayer for emergencies. It is especially for when a man is in the dark, when he feels deserted, and when he is tempted.

All prayer means every kind there is. A man prays in public, with his family, by himself, at work, on the road, in his heart with no voice, and out loud from the heart. Those are settings; there are parts as well — owning up to sin, asking for mercy, thanking God for what has already come. Long set prayers have their proper times, and can be out of season when another duty is waiting; a short one sent up in the middle of ordinary work is never out of season. The verse pairs two words, prayer and supplication, and they are not the same: one way of dividing them makes prayer the asking for some good, and supplication the asking that a feared evil be turned away. Supplication also carries the idea of pleading kept up, and kept up hard.

In the Spirit says where the praying comes from. It is the Spirit's own work: he prays in us, and he is the one who makes us able to pray at all. Holy prayers come from the Holy Spirit. On the man's side it is offered honestly, with his heart in it and nothing pretended, and with the Spirit's help.

Watching means not sleeping — the way a watch was kept in the temple without a break. Watching thereunto means watching with the praying in view. A man is on his guard so that his enemies do not take him by surprise, and he is watching not only against evil but for chances to do good. Among the things he watches for are openings to pray, the Spirit's help while he prays, an answer when it comes, and the chance to give thanks once a blessing has arrived. What he watches against is Satan's temptations, the corruption in his own heart, and any dependence on the praying itself, when what he is to depend on is the one who alone can save.

Then perseverance, which is about staying at it. A man keeps the duty up whatever changes in his circumstances, and keeps it up as long as he lives. He does not cut a prayer short when there is time for it and his heart is willing to go on, and he does not drop a particular request because it has so far been refused. He keeps asking whatever Satan and his own unbelief say to the contrary.

Then the sentence turns. Every piece so far had gone onto his own body, one at a time. The last clause ends on other people: supplication for all saints. Saints there is not a special class. It was the ordinary name Christians went by. And the reach of it is deliberately wide — every nation, age, sex and condition, in all places, and every denomination. The prayer Christ taught his disciples begins our Father rather than mine, and that was the same point: they were not to pray for themselves only, but for all the children of God. Nobody in this world is so far along that he has no need of other people's prayers. The praying will not stay inside a man's own armour, because the people wearing it belong to one another as parts of one body.

The reasons for praying that wide begin close to home. They are our brothers, whatever different skin or language or name they have. Nothing makes a man love other people, and forget their faults, so much as praying for them. The church always needs it: some have gone backwards, some are cold, some are in error, some have given themselves to the world. Then the reasons go out past anybody he could name. Every day some Christian is under a trial peculiar to himself, and though he is a stranger, the prayer may do him good. Every night some of them lie awake with the prospect of dying, and every morning some Christian will die that day, and they should be remembered before God. And the man in the armour is on that list himself. He will be dying before long, and one comfort to him then will be the memory of having prayed often for dying Christians, and the sense that some of the people he prayed for are praying for him. Neither of those is what he is resting on. Every grace and blessing the saints have reaches them from God through Jesus Christ — through what he earned for them, and what he asks for them.

The next words Paul writes are And for me. Having told the church to pray for all the saints, he puts himself into the number. He was in Rome, and the name he gives himself in the next line is an ambassador in bonds. An ambassador's person was treated as sacred in every civilised country, and no greater insult could be offered a nation than to imprison the man it had sent — and here was an ambassador of the King of heaven, in a chain. He had a great command of language, and he had often been noted for his courage; he knew as well as any man what to say, and he still wanted them praying that he would say it as he ought. He asked them to pray that he would be given something to say and be unafraid to say it: that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly. He did not ask them to pray him out of prison. He got what he asked for: he was allowed to preach where he was, and his imprisonment ended up carrying the gospel further instead of stopping it. The praying is the one instruction in the passage that goes out to people he will never meet. And then it comes back, because the first name Paul adds to that praying is his own. He asks from a chain for words, and those seem to have lain nearer his heart than his freedom.

Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes, the Geneva Bible notes and B. W. Johnson. How these teachings are made

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