Building A Daily Prayer HabitChikamu

 As you build your daily prayer habit, remember that you’re trying to remove all associations from prayer other than this: prayer means spending time with God.

——

What do you pray for?

This is an important question. A purely practical person prays for specific needs, whether their own or someone else’s. This is fine and good, but there’s more! 

When Jesus taught his followers to pray, he told them to avoid saying very much. Piling on spiritual-sounding phrases, Jesus says, is a step in the wrong direction. God knows what you need. Prayer is not some type of incantation, some magical formula where if you say just the thing right, God will grant your petition. No, prayer is directed at God. It’s relational and conversational. 

And with that bit of instruction, Jesus gives his followers “The Lord’s Prayer,” a tool to help us understand what we ought to be praying for. 

Notice that the only pronoun in the first half of the prayer is “your.” It’s addressed to God—another reminder that prayer means being with God. We are to pray for His name to be regarded as holy, for His kingdom and will to become a reality on earth.

And when the pronouns change to “us” and “our” in the second half of the prayer, notice that Jesus teaches us to pray for physical provision, for spiritual transformation, and for the power and guidance to live a God-pleasing life. In the bookends to the prayer, we first pray that God would be seen as glorious and that his ways would become embodied on the earth, and we finish by praying that God would be glorified in our lives and that his ways would become reality in our actions. 

Prayer is a conversation with God where we first worship him, and then offer ourselves to him as vessels for his glory and kingdom. We are right to ask God for specific, practical requests, but not to the exclusion of God’s bigger picture and mission.

Tip for Cultivating a Daily Prayer Habit: Add big picture, worship-focused, kingdom-centered prayers to your prayer list. Echo Prayer  is a great  tool to aid in praying for these things.

——