I sat down to just set up a devotional thought for this blog and looked at the praying hand bookends that my wife inherited from her grandmother. My wife's grandmother was a woman of prayer. She knew how to pray, what to pray, when to pray, and usually the results of her prayers have reached deeply into my life. She is with Jesus now, so she no longer prays since she has no needs, and is at peace with God's will. When I consider her prayer life, it makes me wonder what truths about prayer she understood that made her a spiritual giant of intercession? How can we pray like that?
I have read the Prayer of Jabez and am working on The Power of a Praying Husband. I have studied the Scripture in prayer and I still have a lot to learn, but I have learned a few things. So here are some thoughts for you to consider for your own prayer life.
1. God is not interested in your eloquence, He is interested in your heart. When you read through the Psalms, you see raw emotion invested into the prayers that were recorded there. Psalm 83 opens with a plead to God to respond immediately (just one of many in the Psalms). The language of the prayers in the Psalms is sometimes desperate, sometimes angry, sometimes despairing, yet always honest. When you set yourself to speak with the God of the Universe, just remember that He knows every inch of you (Psalm 139:1-2). He just wants you to keep it real with Him... He is interested in your heart.
2. The posture of prayer is not as important as the posture of your heart. People need to stop thinking that God listens to the prayers of those who kneel, who bow their face to the dirt, who stand with heads bowed and eyes closed, etc. Again... God is looking at your heart. When confessing your sins, He desires a broken and contrite spirit. When making your requests known to God, He wants you to have faith in His will and be thankful for everything that He has done, is doing, and will do. Let the Spirit move you in prayer and your body will follow. The broken man will rarely have strength to stand, and the thankful man will sometimes be unable to remain bowed down... but the point is, be real with God and let your physical posture in prayer be a clear reflection of what God is doing in your spirit.
3. Prayer is a response to God, not an initiation of contact. When you take a request to the Lord, remember, He knows it already. Before a word is on your lips, He knows it. We so often get sucked up into this thinking that God is unaware or uncaring of the problems that we are facing. The reality, though, is that God is ready for every trial that we will face. There are several reasons that God seems distant from us: 1) we are going through the refining trial intended to make us stronger in our faith. 2) we are engaged in a sin that we refuse to let go for our relationship with God. 3) we simply have been neglecting our time with God each day.
Really, there are a lot more, but then this wouldn't be a devotional thought for the week or a discussion point. As we consider our prayer lives, let us remember that prayer is our half of our conversation with God. If we do not approach it properly, how can we expect it to have any effect? And worthless praying is simply insane babbling... like what other religions do. Think about it!