By John Piper

I have often said that one of the reasons we feel so weak in our prayer lives is that we have tried to make a domestic intercom out of a wartime walkie-talkie. Prayer is not designed as an intercom between us and God to serve the domestic comforts of the saints. It's designed as a walkie-talkie for spiritual battlefields. It's the link between active soldiers and their command headquarters, with its unlimited firepower and air cover and strategic wisdom.

This is the picture that I think helps capture the spirit of prayer in Colossians 4:2–4:

Here's one way to picture what is going on here. Paul and Timothy (1:1) and Aristarchus (4:10) and Epaphras (4:12) are a unique team of storm troopers in the spiritual battle to recapture the hearts of men for God. They have made a strike at the enemy lines and met a tremendous counterforce. Paul and Aristarchus are prisoners of war. And it looks as though the enemy has a tactical victory in his pocket.

But Paul manages to smuggle a letter out of the prison camp to some fellow soldiers stationed to the rear—that's the Colossians. In the letter he asks them to get on their walkie-talkie, call command headquarters, and ask headquarters to fire a missile that will blast open a door in the prison wall and in the enemy's front line so that Paul and his squad can get on with their mission to release people from the power of Satan and bring them to God.

So the point that we are most interested in here is this: the soldiers to the rear with the walkie-talkie of prayer are very crucial in the frontline successes of evangelism. If they weren't, this text would be a sham.