If your child urgently calls for you from the other side of the house, you will drop what you’re doing to rush to their need. Perhaps it’s happened to you that when you arrive, the child’s request isn’t quite as urgent as they made it sound. You expected to be cleaning up blood, and instead it turns out they just can’t get those pesky Lego pieces apart.
A parent’s temptation is to be dismissive of such requests. But this is to fail to imitate God the Father to our children. In fact, God calls us to pray to Him, with fervent zeal, over our every need, whether big or small. The primary restriction God places on our prayers is that we ought not pray in order to indulge the lust of our flesh (Jas. 4:3).
But if we ask believing, God has promised to hear and grant our requests. God delights to answer your urgent cry for aid. It is not small to Him. It is His joy to speedily answer your most trivial petition. There’s no such thing as an insignificant prayer.
However, a common objection to prayer arises, “Why pray if God is sovereign? Doesn’t He already know my need and even how He’ll meet that need?” Yes. But He is not the plywood deity of the stoics or fatalists. He is not an impersonal deity. He is the Father. And He has covenanted with His children to hear, remember, and act upon their every request.
It is this glorious union of God’s sovereignty & His gracious covenant which forms the ground of our bold praying. He is God over all, and He is your covenant God. He commands you to ask, and He has promised that He will answer. Your duty is to pray about everything, while trusting Him implicitly to answer graciously.
Prayer of Confession
Father God,
You not only command us to pray, but You delight in our prayers. They are not a drudgery to You. Too often, we mutter and complain about our circumstances, when You invite us to bring all our needs unto You. This displays a feeble faith on our part. A faith that would rather grumble, than to trust in Your unfailing goodness. Where we have become tightly wound with anxiety, forgive us. Where we have proudly thought we could handle things on our own, forgive us. Where we have hidden our sin, forgive us. We bring it all to Your footstool now, that we may obtain mercy and grace to help in time of need.
You have called Your church to truth in the inward parts, so we now confess our individual sins to You. Selah.
We do this in Jesus’ mighty name, and Amen.
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