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The Lord hears when I call to Him (Psalm 4:3b, NASB).
I enjoy sitting in my prayer chair in my office with a cup of coffee, praying early in the morning.
Recently, during prayer, I asked myself, “Why do I pray?” I did this to refocus my praying, as staying fresh in anything that we do requires an evaluation of why we do it. I came up with five reasons why I pray.
- An awareness of God’s presence.
Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there (Psalm 139:7-8).
God’s presence isn’t lacking, but our awareness of Him wanes easily. Through the years, I’ve learned to sense God’s presence. In my early morning prayers, my soul confesses and releases those things that obscure my awareness of Him.
A keynote feature of God’s presence is peace; if we aren’t experiencing peace, we need to let go of what we grasp other than Him.
- I get to ask. I believe asking God is a privilege. Children ask their fathers just about everything. Jesus says, “If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it” (John 14:14). I appreciate this quote from a book that I read decades ago by Richard Foster, simply entitled Prayer…
Do you know why the mighty God of the universe chooses to answer prayer? It is because his children ask. God delights in our asking. He is pleased at our asking. His heart is warmed by our asking.
(Click to purchase this book.)
- It Allows God to be God. When we ask God for ourselves, the Bible calls this petition, and when we ask for others, it’s called intercession (Read 1 Timothy 2:1 in the NASB and NASB1995). The point of asking is for God to be God and for us to be us. We don’t provide for ourselves, and prayer keeps our provider God in His proper place!
In prayer, through my petitions and intercessions — God is God! There’s nothing better.
- I hear His voice. The entire Bible contains about 650 recorded prayers, and in many of them, God spoke during the prayer. I recently went through all the major Biblical characters, and God spoke with all of them while they were praying, including Abraham, David, Isaiah, Daniel, Jesus, Paul, and Peter.
I’ve joined this list, and the Bible invites you to hear God during your prayers as well.
The prophet Jeremiah wrote that God said to him, “Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3, NASB).
- I watch. Jesus told his disciples to “watch and pray” in the Garden of Gethsemane, and they responded by falling asleep. When Jesus found them sleeping, He asked Peter, “So, you men could not watch with me one hour?” (Matthew 26:40)
I want to be found watching. I pray for my family, my ministry co-workers, and my friends. I also pray for our government, for the prosperity of my community, and for an end-times revival of disciple-making.
The more we pray, the more we experience God hearing and acting on our requests. Charles Spurgeon said, “Whether we like it or not, asking is the rule of the Kingdom!”
Let’s pray!