So the apostle is able to say, verse 16, that he ceases not to give thanks for them, to praise God for them. ‘Making mention of you in my prayers.
That is what we have to do and if we find it hard, then we fill the back of our Bible with lists and we look at things and we make sure that each day we have a ministry of intercession, and we don’t just say, ‘Bless all the persecuted.’ Sometimes we are a little like that in public prayer, because we have but a short time and in public prayer, as we come together, we are compelled to generalise more but in our private prayers we need to do better than just bring generalisations. ‘Lord, bless thy people in Indonesia, where we hear from time to time of whole villages which are known to be occupied by Christians being attacked and houses burned down. Turn the minds of those assailants to other things.’ And we think of the Christians in Afghanistan – and of course in Iraq and here and there – and we name them. ‘Making mention of you in our prayers.’ And we may not know a lot about the sufferers but even to mention the countries slows us down and it says to the Lord, ‘We mean this prayer. It is not just a sentence; we are concerned for others and we pray for them. The Lord has commanded us to pray in that way and we know, therefore, he will hear our prayers. Even my prayer will have been taken account of before the world began and will make a difference in the goodness of God to the lot of suffering Christians and for all believers. So we need to be more definite.