What Prayer is:
Prayer is the conscious, personal communication with God our creator
Big Question:
- Has your prayer life improved over the last 5 years?
- The last 2 years
- Last 12 months
Here is what I know about most of us…
- Most of us pray
- Most of us don’t have a good grasp of how to pray
- Most of us aren’t sure if prayer makes a difference
Before we leave today, I want you to know this:
Prayer is Personal and personal prayer is powerful
Those kinds of prayers are prayed that make a difference
Today Is About Personal Prayers
- Or prayers that help us know God personally
In the south, we use “Yes Sir/Yes Ma’am”
- Can’t help it – it’s a sign of respect. A FORMALITY
- I’m teaching my kids the same thing – To show respect
- Hate it when they answer me with “Yeah” or “What?!”
Formalities are great, but can also create distance
- I want to teach them respect, but also not create distance between them
I am Their Father
- Want them to run to me when there is a problem
- Come to me with joy when they are excited
- Have a great relationship in the future
Respect is important, but it’s not the whole relationship
This is important when it comes to prayer
- How you approach God in prayer explains a lot about how you really view him
Here are a few common approaches:
- Wrong kind of prayers:
The reverent but distant prayer:
- What many of us grew up hearing in church
- Spoken like you would to a judge or principle
- This prayer is over-focused on RESPECT. No Focus on the Personal
The Chant Prayer:
- Re-praying what you learn once
- Say it without thinking about it
The 911 prayer:
- Prayed only in emergency
- Prayer stops when emergency stops
The “At The Buzzer” Prayers
- Hope that something happens, but don’t actually expect it to
- “Help me pass this test I didn’t study for”
The Transactional Prayer
- If you do this, I will do that…
Do any of these prayers help us Get to know God better?
The first point of Prayer is to get to know God more personally
- To know his heart
- To learn his will
- Not Get what we want
- Not to sound impressive to others
- Not to “just hope for the best”
It’s to learn how to be In a relationship with God
The story of prayer goes back to Genesis
- God creates and places us within His creation
He gave humanity a job to do
- Be his image-bearers and rules over the earth on His behalf
But as we all know, it didn’t stay that way
- Adam and Eve temped – and failed
Sin Separates
- Us from God
- Us from each other
Gen 3
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”
10 And he said, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.”
Sin Separated us from God
- The personal relationship was broken
Why does sin separate?
- Because Sin breaks trust and trust is the currency of all relationships
- Where there is no trust, there cannot be a personal relationship
When Jesus comes onto the scene, People had all the respect of God but had lost the personal aspect of their relationship with him.
Matthew 6
5 When you pray, don’t be like those show-offs who love to stand up and pray in the meeting places and on the street corners. They do this just to look good. I can assure you that they already have their reward.
6 When you pray, go into a room alone and close the door. Pray to your Father in private. He knows what is done in private, and he will reward you.
7 When you pray, don’t talk on and on as people do who don’t know God. They think God likes to hear long prayers. 8 Don’t be like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask.
9 You should pray like this: Our Father in heaven, help us to honor your name.
Jesus wants us to know that our prayers to God are personal
That every time we pray, we are practicing for the future reality of being in a relationship with God
Every-time we come before our heavenly father, we are going against the brokenness of this world
- We are saying to sin and its separation
- We are proclaiming a future hope of unity and wholeness
Personal praying is powerful praying
- Because its the kind of prays that God hears and that move his heart
Personal prayers changes us to be more in line with God’s will for our lives
Hebrews 5
13 Now everyone who lives on milk is inexperienced with the message about righteousness because he is an infant. 14 But solid food is for the mature—for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil.
How to pray to be more personal with God
- Prayer regularly
- Prayer is for your lifetime, not your current circumstance
- Pray with honesty
- Expect God to change you before he changes your circumstances
- Memorize verses that you can pray through
- Don’t quit when it seems like it’s not making a difference
- Come to pray expecting to talk to your father, who loves you
God is patient with us
- Don’t worry if you don’t think you have it right all the time