Prayer is not a trade floor

A lot has happened in life recently, Christmas break has been full. I will talk about that another time though. Today, while at lunch, we began to talk about prayer and how often we incorrectly pray. And yes, I do believe that we can and often do incorrectly pray. Not to say that the ultimate forgiver and gracious God didn't already know ahead of time of our even trite mistake, but non-the-less, we slip up and say things that aren't actually intended as such. My first awareness of some of this was a couple summers ago. A friend and I got to talking about how we have the promise that God will never leave us or forsake us. He promises that He will always be with us, right beside us, as believers. Well, if we have this promise, and a promise from God will NEVER be broken, taken out of context or anything- it's plain and simple, then why do we always pray for God to be with us? "God, please be with her as she goes through this hard time or God please be with me on this test today." If we really have that promise that He is ALWAYS with us then why do we pray stuff like that? Now let me not blow all of this up and act like it isn't good to pray for guidance, His sure presence to put you in the right direction or make Himself known to someone. My point is that often we spit things out in prayer, reel it off like we're reading our prayers or have memorized them years ago and so we lose not only our passion and meaning but also our desire for them to come true because we're so used to saying them we don't really even know we've uttered them or what these prayers really mean. Anyway, so like I was saying, that was the first time I've considered actually praying correctly. I've always tried hard to view God as an all-encompassing kind of God to pray to- meaning that everything you say while praying or however you say it was ok with Him as long as you talked to Him. I think the church may tell us that so we all can feel more comfortable talking to God, I'm not really sure. But now I see that there is a right way of praying. It's not a set of specific words, it's a lot of things, but there are right things to pray. I think during prayer we convey what we think about God, His abilities and His character. I don't know if you've really thought about that, but if you do, I think you'll agree. When we pray we infer in our prayers, in our tone and words, what we think about the abilities and character of God.

Prayer is not a trade floor. It is not some bartering system where we can "make a deal" with God. It's not a negotiation, it's not one big swapping game trying to make both parties happy. Why are we so quick to do the "God, if you let this thing happen then I'll be good the rest of the week" or "If you let this happen and I won't ask for anything else" we all know the game. Oh, sure, you're mature and "don't play" anymore. PLEASE. I play, and I bet you do too. We may subconsciously do it, making deals with God or begging Him to do "just this one thing". I'm drawing a blank right now as to a really great example, but I think you get the drift. We have to realize that God is first Father, above being creator, about sustainer, He is Father. "Jesus is the firstborn over all creation" Before anything was put into being, God was Jesus' Father. My point is that we beg and plead for Him to "answer" our prayers the way we want them to be answered. We pray not yielding to the Father to provide but instead telling Him the situation and then telling Him the way He should fix it. Now there are times that we must intercede in our prayers but I believe that God will make it known to us when this time arises. I'm talking about the first right now though. A Father greatly desires to give His child everything, do you know that? Do we believe it? God so desires to give us everything we want, but that wouldn't be a loving Father would it?