How to Pray for the People You LoveSample

I love how honest the Bible is. I'm often surprised as I'm reading to find such raw, authentic human moments in the pages of God's word.

One of those moments takes place in Psalm 22. In this passage, David tells God that he feels abandoned by Him as if God is not answering him and will not deliver him from his current struggle.

Have you had a moment like that as you prayed? If you have, I encourage you to read Psalm 22 and know you aren't weird.

What's truly mind-blowing to me, though, is that if I turn my Bible one page from those words, I find David singing a very different tune. In Psalm 23, he wrote, "The Lord is my shepherd. I have all that I need…Only goodness and love will pursue me all the days of my life. "

How can one person express these two very different feelings?! Well, David is wrestling with God's goodness and sovereignty in the midst of real life. When you pray honestly, you pray like Psalm 22 and Psalm 23.

Do you want a specific outcome for someone you love, but you can't make it happen? Then, you're experiencing the overflow of your love for them and your limits. You've come to the end of what you can control and recognize that you are not God.

Eventually, we all have to wrestle with God's character. Is He really sovereign? Is He really powerful? Is He really in control? Is He really good?

As a pastor, I often meet people who have prayed for something, and it didn't work out the way that they prayed for. They asked God for something, but He didn't give them what they wanted when they wanted it.

Is that why you don't pray much anymore? Because if God were really good, He wouldn't allow that to happen. If God were really sovereign, He wouldn't allow that, right? If God really cared, how could things end up like they did?!

In the aftermath of the miraculous moment I had with God in that prayer chapel I told you about on Day 1, I was in a Psalm 23 state. "God, thank you so much. You're good, you're faithful. I felt you, you're real." But several years before that, I was praying Psalm 22.

One day, near the end of high school, the phone rang at my house at five o'clock in the morning.

My dad answered the phone. A few moments later, I heard the garage door open, and his Buick peeled out. It's hard to make a Buick peel out! I got out of bed, went into my parents' room, and found my mom crying.

I knew that something had happened. What I didn't realize was that my best friend, at 17 years old, had died.

While lying face down, he'd had a seizure, literally suffocating in his pillow. That news wrecked me. He was my first close friend to die. I wasn't praying Psalm 23 that day. I was praying Psalm 22. "God, Jamin had so much potential! As a junior, he had a full-ride college scholarship for playing saxophone. His humor was healing in every room he stepped in. He was the life of every party. At 17 years old, his whole life was ahead of him. God, this makes no sense!"

Since then, I've wrestled with God, grieved, and healed a lot. Here's what I want to share with you as a result of that work. If we're praying to God as David did in Psalm 22, then we're going to need to embrace mystery. It's been over twenty years since Jamin died, and I still don't understand.

Eventually, intercession will lead you to a moment when you wrestle with God and struggle to understand Him. So, I refuse to disrespect you with a trite answer to your big questions. I don't know why, and I don't understand how God works.

I am not God. When I pray, I am reminded of that fact again and again. Prayer reminds me of how small I am, how big He is, how little I know, and how much He does.

Psalm 22 tells me there's a place to pray like that. Psalm 23 tells me I won't always pray like that.

We love people, and we have limits. In that space, we see the third key principle in this plan: Prayer becomes the way we wrestle in faith with God.

Tomorrow, we're going to wrap up this plan by considering what must be present in our hearts to sustain our intercession for others. The secret to more intercessory prayer in your life might surprise you!