Discovering the Lord’s PrayerSample

Ministering to the Lord

One of my favorite parts of the Lord’s Prayer is how it begins. The prayer starts by acknowledging that the name of God needs to be honored and recognized first. Before Jesus taught His disciples to pray for their needs or for the forgiveness of sins, He started by making God the center. I firmly believe that this is what ministering to the Lord is all about.

In ministering to God, we make it our goal to behold Him. We want to see the Father smile. We seek to attend to His wants and needs, to partner with Him, to feel how He feels, and to prepare the way for His Kingdom. In the prayer room, we minister to the Lord. We make Him our priority. He becomes the most important Person in our lives, the one we gaze upon. In Isaiah 56:6, God calls people to come to His holy mountain to minister to Him. They went up the mountain to offer sacrifices and to rejoice with the Lord. As they did so, God made them joyful in His house of prayer.

Day in and day out, in the prayer room or not, we have been called to be ministers. Revelation 5:10 talks about how the Lord has made us a kingdom of priests to our God. A priest in the Old Testament would bring daily sacrifices to the altar. After Jesus became the High Priest, we gained access to the throne to praise, love, and minister to the King (Hebrews 4:14–16). We, as priests, now get to bring free-will offerings to our Beloved. This is our identity. We are priests, and we get to prepare the way so our King can be glorified and exalted forever. My heart burns to see a generation that prepares the way for the Lord.

Psalm 22:3 expresses how God inhabits the praise of His people. As we seek God in the prayer room, I pray that we will make Jesus the Center of everything and that our time will not be about singing or saying a prayer but about focusing on Him. Jesus loves it when we minister to Him. He takes our pure worship as a pure offering, and He loves the fragrance of it. I pray that God will find faithful ministers who seek to give Him, not what we think He wants, but what He actually wants.