How To Pray – Part 2

Last week we discussed the idea that God’s primary desire is to be in relationship with us and that He wants us to pray to Him.  We also talked about several roadblocks that keep us from praying more often.  Today we’ll we’ll go a little deeper into prayer and we’ll start with a passage from Matthew 6:9-10:

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.  Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

These verses are the first two of the Lord’s prayer and, as you can see, they are  focused on God, not us.  Some of us have prayed the Lord’s prayer hundreds or even thousands of times but how often do we stop to think about what these two verses mean and why Jesus wants us to start with them?

I believe Jesus placed these verses first to tell us that God wants us to lift Him up above everything else and, that in order to in harmony with God, we need to recognize Him as our Father who created us & the world we live in and that His will is supreme.

But how do we typically view prayer?  It seems like most of the time we think about praying FOR something – career success, relief from pain & sickness, or maybe to do well on a test.  This view of prayer is consistent with two of the roadblocks to prayer we discussed last week:

1. We don’t want to “bother” God with petty requests, and
2. We don’t want to seem selfish by asking for things for ourselves

So if these things keep us from praying, maybe we should flip our thinking 180 degrees and look at prayer mostly as our chance to glorify God and tell Him how great we think He is?  Obviously, God already knows how great He is and doesn’t need us to tell Him.  So maybe He wants us to do this so we don’t forget.  When we look at it that way, prayer can viewed as something we need to do instead of something that’s optional.  Here are some questions for discussion:

1. Do you agree with the idea that we mostly think of prayer as an opportunity to ask God for things?
2. If we prioritize glorifying God in our prayers and pray more consistently, what are some of the good things that might come from doing that?
3. When you think about prayer as primarily focused on glorifying God, does that make you want to pray more often?
4. If you were teaching someone about prayer who had never heard of it, how would you describe its purpose?