THE ATTITUDE OF A PRAYER

THIS IS TABLE ROCK FELLOWSHIP – PASTOR RYAN LADEN (DEVOTIONALS)

The Attitude of a Prayer

“Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank Him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard you hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.”

Philippians 4:6-7(NLT)

I’d also wager that few of us have found prayer to be a complete and permanent antidote to worry. Most times, my personal sequence goes as follows: worry-pray-worry-repeat. Why is it that, sometimes, prayer doesn’t offer peace – certainly not the peace that verse 6 describes as, “so marvelous that we can’t even understand it” – but, instead, leaves us in the same anxious state where we started? Part of the answer may be the attitudes we bring to prayer.

A marriage where talk is minimal, only about making requests, and only during crisis situations, would not be a healthy marriage. Certainly, loving communication includes words expressing what I need, but also words of appreciation, wonder, knowing, praise, and love.

In light of that analogy, here are some attitudes that rob us of the peace that God promises us through prayer:

We are robbed of peace by a wrong perspective on God and on ourselves:

Someone wise once said that “We pray not to remind God, but to remind ourselves.” We remind ourselves who is God, and who is not (us). We remind ourselves that His understanding is complete, while ours is limited, faulty, and biased. We remind ourselves that His plan (will) is perfect; ours is twisted by sin, selfishness, and impatience.
 

We are robbed of peace through our impatience:
Psalm 27:14 tells us, “Wait on the Lord: Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.”

There is peace in waiting – in being willing to trust and rest in God’s perfect timing. Often, God’s delay is specifically because He is being patient with me and those I pray for:
 

“But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day. The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is [endlessly] patient for your sake.”

2 Peter 3:8-9 (NLT)

We are robbed of peace by “trying” rather than “training”:
It is so easy to live independent of God in our prayer life, until we are driven to Him by crisis. Having not “trained” for peace through regular prayer about everything (vs 6), we “try” for peace in the moments of crisis, with the expected results.
 

We are robbed of peace by not thanking God:
Notice that verse 6 directs us to both tell God what we need, and thank God for what he has done. He is either in the process of answering each of our prayers, or He may have already answered them. An encouraging habit is to revisit our prayer lists and thank God with assurance that He has answered, or is answering, each of our requests according to His will. We can have peace that even if we have asked wrong, He has answered right.
 

We are robbed of peace by not yielding our desires to God:
Often, we ask for what we want, and are unwilling to accept anything else. Maybe our peace would be increased if we pre-screened our prayer requests with the question, “Am I willing to accept from God exactly the opposite of what I am asking?” For over two decades, Jill Weber has been a prayer missionary, a sort of modern-day monastic, who spends several hours a day in prayer. Jill exemplifies the kind of peace that comes from yielding to God. Jill says, “I have learned to say to God, “The answer is yes… Now what is the question?””

Prayer

Lord,
Give us the humility to see You as You are, and us as we are. Draw us to consistency in our conversation with You, so that You can train us to recognize Your presence, wait on You, and yield to Your will.

-Tim and Lori Case

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