This week's promise

 

This week's promise: Our prayers bring us into God's presence (as always from........God's Daily Promises )

 

How should I pray?

 

For days I mourned, fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven. Nehemiah 1:4

Pray like this:
Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored.
May your Kingdom come soon.
May your will be done here on earth, just as it is in heaven.
Give us our food for today, and forgive us our sins, just as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us.
And don't let us yield to temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Matthew6:9-13

 

Aligning my will to God's

E. Stanley Jones described the effect of prayer on us like this:

Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God. Aligned to God's redemptive will, anything, everything can happen in character, conduct, and creativeness. The whole person is heightened by that prayer contact. In that contact I find health for my body, illumination for mymind, and moral and spiritual reinforcement for my soul. "Prayer is a time exposure to God," so I expose myself to God for an hour and a half or two hours a day, asking less and less for things and more and more for Himself. For having Him, I have everything. He gives me what I need for character, conduct, and creativeness, so I'm rich with His riches, strong in His strength, pure in His purity, and able in His ability.

quoted by R. Kent Hughes in 1001 Great Stories and Quotes (Tyndale House) p 326

This is always where I fall short.  I do great in my prayer life.  When praying I am strict about asking for God's will in all tht I ask for.  I thank Him.  I tell Him that I will accept His will in my life.  But I never let Him go about His business.  I am always thinking about the things that I have asked God to work on.  I even try to help Him out.

So, of course, He moves back.  He let's me deal with these things.  Even when I specifically told Him that I cannot do this or that on my own.  That my shoulders are not strong enough and that I know that He is capable of changing these things in my life.  So He sits back and says, "You asked for Me to help you, but from where I'm sitting you are trying to do My job.  You are not letting My Will prevail."  God is right when He thinks this.

I've been told so many times that I need to let go of my life and give it to God.  He knows my beginnings and my endings.

  

I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.  Mark 11:23-25

But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.  Romans 8:25-27

 

So praying for His Will and letting it go is what I need to do.  Like this.....

LET GO AND LET GOD     

As children bring their broken toys,
with tears for us to mend,
I brought my broken dreams to God,
because Heis my friend.
But then instead of leaving Him
in peace to work alone,
I hung around and tried to help,
with ways that were my own.
At last, I snatched them back again
and cried, "How can you be so slow?"
"My child" He said, "What could I do?
You never did let go."  
--Author Unknown