Prayer For Help with Problems

So many things right now in our present life are trying to be loud, trying to take our attention. It could be situations, insecurities, anxieties, or any number of things. When life gets loud, we need to make truth louder.

We need to realize that prayer is louder than the problems we face. As believers, we need to develop healthy prayer lives, before the problems even come.

Primitive Prayer

I don’t know if this sounds familiar to you but someone once classified prayer in different forms. The lowest form of prayer was called -Primitive prayer- when you hear primitive, what do you think of? Something like a caveman right?

When you pray primitively, you tend to see God as just some higher being, but you don usually see him as all-powerful or all-holy, or all-good. You are literally just praying to Him from a place of fear and need, NOT love and desire, and it’s usually just to get you something, once you have it, you’re done with prayer.

Does that sound familiar at all?? I think we all have been there at some point or another.

Prayer of a Christian

But the prayer of a Christian, of a fully devoted follower of God, is more than that, it is sharing with God our needs and desires not to just get things from God but to be more fully conformed to His purposes and His will, prayer is no longer based just on need, but also on love.

It is not to detach from the problems of the world but to attach more to God and to other people.

Matthew 6:5-8 says:

5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Jesus in this chapter is talking about what the spiritual life looks like. That followers of Christ must live for God’s approval and not for people. That we can turn the spiritual life into a religious masquerade instead of genuine, authentic spirituality.

At that time period, it was common to pray in the morning, afternoon and evening.

V. 5-“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.—

When it says they would stand out praying on the street corners, is not just any street, these streets were wide, meaning that there were a ton of people on it. The more people who could see him praying, and how “holy” he was, the better.

V. 6- But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. —–but Jesus says when YOU pray, not the hypocrite but you, a follower of God, go and do it in private so you can have exclusive focus on God.

He is not saying that praying in public is bad either, Jesus prayed in public all the time, but a person who prays only in public and never in private is probably praying for the wrong reasons.

Jesus is saying that we put on a religious act instead of dive into genuine spirituality.

V. 7- 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. – they call this ritual prayer, it is actually the next higher form of prayer after primitive.

It’s not more meaningful or deeper, but they believe that by repeating yourself something will happen… Magically. Pagans, those who worshipped false gods, would say the name of their gods over and over again without thinking.

Prayer is repetition

This is nothing like the heartfelt repetition that flows from your heart, even Jesus repeated Himself but it was emotional and came from the heart. When I first read this, I was like oh man I can’t repeat myself when I’m praying, I’m an emotional dude, I repeat myself when I pray, because I am caught up in the emotional relationship with God, and that is not what it is talking about.

We can’t win God over with our words, but we can connect with Him through our hearts.

It’s also ironic because Jesus says not to do meaningless repetition right before the Lord’s prayer, which is the most often repeated without meaning passage in the entire Bible. Still a powerful passage of Jesus teaching us how to pray.

The big idea though is this- it is our heart before God in prayer that matters above anything else.

Prayer is about the heart

Prayer is about the heart before God above anything else

Many of you have come to a standstill.

In fact, in vs 8 it says, your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. Prayer is not about informing God, but expressing to God our need for Him, He’s not like, “oh snap I didn’t know you needed that, let me grab a pencil, let me write this down” haha.

That might make you ask, okay, why do I have to ask Him if He already knows? Good question.

Thank God we don’t have to understand prayer in order to pray. But there are two reasons we don’t pray– We don’t pray to impress God and we don’t pray to inform God.

We pray to invite God.

We say to God, “I do not understand why this is happening, but God I am inviting You to come along with me.

To walk alongside me, to go on this journey, because I know I can’t do this without You, for us to work together, for You to develop me, for You to grow me, for me to depend on You.”

Because if God just did everything for us and we never had to pray, soon we would begin to take things for granted, we would stop depending on Him and He never wants us to live our lives apart of Him.

SO we invite Him into our lives, our situations, our relationships, our problems and say God we are doing this together.

Prayer is where we can reveal our deepest selves to God, and He can reveal His desires to us, it is crying out to God from the depths of who we are, pouring out our soul, passionately pleading with God, even wrestling with God. It connects us with Him.

THE POWER OF YOUR SPIRITUAL LIFE IS FOUND IN THE DISCIPLINE OF YOUR PRAYER LIFE

Prayer is the pulse of the Christian life.

Where are some areas of your life where you need to invite God?