NOTES for Еф 6:18
What is prayer? The simplest and clearest answer: the communion with God, the words that we tell him hoping to hear the answer. So; but it is when we are alone. For example, on a desert island. And there everything is not also simple: because people leave all the same inhabited places to arrive to the deserted islands. This definition would be completely exhaustive only in case if in all the universe there was only one person.
But such was never the case and will probably never be it. And the problem is not even there, but in the fact that a person, according to God's word, "is not complete" (" It is not good that man should be alone", as transmits it God's words the King James Version translation). And if man is not alone, then his communication with God will be not only his personal affair, no matter how much the communication itself is personal. Indeed, the relationship of man with God and his relationship with other people are interrelated things. And if we made another step and looked at the situation, how it develops in the people of God? Here already it is not any more simply a human community, here is a community connected with this God's presence, sanctifying each of his members, action which makes of the people of God what it is.
And with such an influence, when it is in particular God's presence which unites the people and makes it one whole spiritual, the prayer already does not just cease to be a private affair of the individual, but becomes directly a matter of divine-human. And in the church all these relationships and interdependencies still strengthen: because the Church brings to the world the Kingdom, and in the Kingdom sanctifies already not simply God's presence, it is directly quite penetrated by the breath of God, which transforms and sanctifies everything. And the prayer of every inhabitant of the Kingdom wove into this breath, by becoming its integral part.
So the prayer of a person becomes the prayer for all the people of God, becoming at the same time the prayer of these people. And, perhaps, God only knows, which place occupies such a prayer in the construction of the Kingdom, in the creation of this spiritual unity, which constitutes the fabric of the Kingdom. But, be that as it may, the prayer is already here not simply the communion with God, but also the edification with God. And every of such prayer of course brings near the day of the final triumph of the Kingdom, which the Savior brought into the world.