Prayer Discourse 1: The Purpose of Prayer

How many of you are like me?  You pray for yourself and other people and things and when you don’t see anything happen you get discouraged and want to give up?

Purpose for prayer is not so much to get things from God, but for us to know God.

(A mentor I had long ago quoted a Dr. Hugo as saying, “There are two and only two purposes for prayer – 1. To bring us to God i.e. get to know Him, worship Him; and 2. To get us to accept His perspective, i.e. do His will.)

Why does that seem so foreign/unnatural and our prayers become primarily making requests for ourselves and those we know?  We seek happiness and believe we would attain that if we had more things, everyone liked us, and everything went the way we wanted them to go.  Would you be happy if everything went your way?

Insisting on my own way is playing the role of God in my life and wanting to decide what is right and wrong, what is good and bad.  That’s the essence of sin and the result of going my own way is decay and death.  This pride issue shows itself even more prominently by the attitude of “I’ll do it myself.”  A more passive form of this is simply prayerlessness.

Proverbs 16:25 There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.

So if my way cannot bring happiness and fulfillment – these cannot be the goal; these are just the by products of, let’s call it, Real Life – if my way cannot bring me Real Life, what does?

Luke 9:24  He who seeks to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel will save it.

(Balancing truth: God seeks His own glory; He created us for His glory. Isa. 43:7 But “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. John Piper)

One of the questions I’d like us to think about is:

How does God intend for His work to be accomplished?

John 6:29  this is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.

Matt. 9:36-38  And seeing the multitudes….pray The Lord of the harvest to send out laborers.

John 14:12-14     “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go to the Father. And whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.”

SO a laborer’s starting point is prayer.  “The greatest thing anyone can do for God and man is pray.  You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.”  S.D. Gordon

The best way to grow in the area of prayer is:

1. Be a person of the Word.  Memorize it.  Meditate on it.  Hide it in your heart.  Pray it.
2. Practice. Just do it.  Pray. Pray alone, in secret.  Pray together.  Pray as your first conscious thought in the morning and your last waking thoughts at night.  Pray throughout the day.  Pray without ceasing.