male announcer: In Touch, the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley. Next on “In Touch,” “Praying With Impact.” Dr. Charles Stanley: If someone should say to you, “How can I pray for you?” what would you say? Do you have something specific that you could say? Well, sometimes you might, sometimes you may not, or sometimes you may be a little too embarrassed to even answer the question.
And you may think, “Well, they’re being a little nosy.” No, they really wanna know how to pray for you. Do you have an answer? And let me ask you this: Do you know how to pray for someone else? Well, your answer may be “You know, I’m so–I have so many issues in my own life. I don’t have time to pray for somebody else.
” Well, you really do. You either don’t because of sin in your life, you don’t because you don’t care, but maybe you don’t because you don’t know how. If somebody says to me, “Pastor, how can I pray for you?” I have an exact answer, and it’s an answer I want you to consider this morning. It’s an answer I want you to consider for yourself because it is a prayer.
Two things are true about it. Number one, you do not have to ask if it’s the will of God. And, secondly, you can pray with absolute confidence. And so, oftentimes, we say, almost like magic, “If it be Thy will. Lord, if You’ll do this, if it be Thy will–” there’s something that’s very clear in the Bible that’s the will of God.
And so I want you to think about this prayer seriously because if somebody prays this prayer for you, it’s gonna make a difference in your life. If you pray–on a couple of conditions we’ll mention later– for somebody else, it’s gonna make a con–it’s gonna make a difference in their life. So, I want you to turn to the first chapter of Colossians, and I want us to read a few verses here.
Paul was in Ephesus about three years and preaching the gospel, and one of his converts that he mentions here was Epaphras, and he went to Colossae and probably began preaching there. And so Paul didn’t know them personally, and so he writes this Epistle, and here’s what he says as he begins in verse 7: “Just as you learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow bond-servant, who is a faithful servant of Christ on our behalf, and he also informed us of your love in the Spirit.
