Romans 10:1-4
Periodically, someone will ask me how they might reach a person they love with the Gospel of Christ. Their request comes out of a deep burden for the person that doesn’t know Jesus. We should all be grateful for people that don’t hoard their eternal life just for themselves, but want others to experience it, too.
Usually, when I’m asked a question like this, I share three or four things that anyone can do to show the love of Christ to an unsaved loved one or friend. But, the one thing I always emphasize to everybody that asks this question is the importance of constant and focused prayer to God for the salvation of the one needing Christ.
We find in Paul’s Powerful Prayers a demonstration that this was his practice, as well. In Romans 10:1, Paul writes,
“Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved.”
Clearly, Paul considered prayer to be one of the most important things he could do in reaching his own countrymen for Christ. Of course, if you study his ministry carefully, you see that not only did he pray for people to be saved, he also brought them the message of the Gospel. But, prayer was essential to his message having a powerful impact on their lives.
Romans 9-11 deals with the issue of the nation of Israel and whether He has abandoned them and the promises He made to them. Paul argues that though God’s blessings are presently on His church, this did not violate or negate His commitment to His chosen people. In other words, God is not through with the Nation of Israel...in spite of their present unbelief.
Part of proving his thesis is found in his prayer to God for Israel to be saved. Though the people of Israel had stumbled spiritually (9:33), had sought to establish their own righteousness (10:3), and were guilty of unbelief (10:14), disobedience and obstinacy (10:21), God’s promises to them were still to be fulfilled.
Interestingly, in chapter nine Paul emphasizes the sovereignty of God in election (in choosing the nation of Israel) and in chapter ten he emphasizes human responsibility (why they have stumbled spiritually and He has established the church). At least five times (10:8, 11, 12, 16, 21) Paul lays their present, though temporary rejection by God, at the feet of the Nation of Israel because of their unbelief (human responsibility).
Theologians have long discussed how these two truths (divine sovereignty/human responsibility) work together, with most taking their ideas well beyond what the scripture teaches in defending their positions. For some reason, many people seem to believe that they can fully grasp all of the mind of God and are able to reason exactly how divine sovereignty and human responsibility may be reconciled with each other. Paul doesn’t make this mistake, but chooses to emphasize two equally important truths and leaves their reconciliation to God. Even though in chapter nine He is dealing with the sovereignty of God in election, he opens chapter 10 with a prayer begging God for the salvation of his fellow countrymen and places the responsibility on them to turn from their obstinacy and disbelief.
This prayer (10:1) serves as a model for how we should be praying for those that need to come to Christ and for the nations of the earth to hear the message of the Gospel.
His ultimate concern in this prayer is for the salvation of the people of Israel. To be “saved” means to be rescued or delivered from some imminent danger. In the context of people’s lives and with eternity in view, the salvation of God is His rescuing people from the penalty of their sins. We are all sinners by birth, as well as by choice! Because God is righteous and holy, He cannot merely overlook our sins but must judge them justly. That means that every man living in this world is under the condemnation of God (John 3:18; Romans 6:23) and the only way to be delivered out from under it is through Jesus Christ.
I think many of the causes in which people are involved in our society are important and I’m thankful people are working to make a difference in these areas. But, if all we do is reform society and don’t also bring to them the transforming power of the Gospel, we have failed in our ultimate mission as believers and a church.
If you want to see the importance of this mission, just listen to how Paul’s prayer is described. It is his “heart’s desire” that people are delivered from the wrath to come for their sins against God. The “heart” sometimes points to the intellect, but here it more specifically points to his emotions. Listen to what he said in the opening verses of chapter 9 and hear the cry of Paul’s heart.
“I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God. Amen.” (Romans 9:1-5)
This is a man so deeply burdened for his fellow Israelites that if surrendering his own salvation would bring his people to faith in Christ...he would be willing to do so (this is hypothetical in order to express the depth of his burden).
When is the last time we wept over someone’s eternal soul? When have we ever felt so burdened about a person’s eternal destiny that it weighed heavily on us with an aching inside that drove us to prayer for them?
Take a few minutes this week to look around where you live, work and play to see the people that need to know Jesus. Can you see that they are more than bodies? They are eternal souls that are either going to spend eternity with God or separated from Him. When Paul looked at his fellow countrymen, his heart ached within him and it drove him to pray to God on their behalf that they might be saved. And, his prayer was more than just a casual request to God. The Greek word translated “prayer” indicates petitions on their behalf, even to the place of pleading (begging) with God for their souls.
Remember, as this chapter points out, the problem is their own willfulness and stubbornness to remain in unbelief (human responsibility). But, Paul would not give up on them and prayed for them to come to faith in Christ just as he had done on the road to Damascus.
Paul’s prayer is proof that he did not consider their rejection as final or that they could not be saved because of divine sovereignty.
As I said earlier, one of the most important things you can do for a person that does not know Christ is to intercede on his behalf that God might continue working in his heart to draw him to Himself.
Here are some practical ideas of how to go about praying for those who do not know Christ.
- Ask God to help you see people as He sees them.
- Make friends with people that don’t know Christ with the intention of introducing them to Christ.
- Always keep a list with you of those you are asking God to save.
- Set specific times to pray just for the eternal souls of those without Christ.
- Pray for areas of the world where we have missionaries and ask God to open hearts to the Gospel.
- Pray for areas of the world where we don’t know any missionaries and ask God to open doors of possibility for missionaries.
- Pray for God to give you opportunities every week to share His love story and that you will not miss those opportunities.
