One of the things I’ve learned over the last twenty years is I’m often not wise enough to know how to pray. Oh, you can bet that I have opinions about what I want and how I think things should go. It’s just that my track record for knowing what’s best is inconsistent. Sometimes I pray for the wrong things. I’ve been known to ask for things that would’ve been harmful, had God given them to me. Thankfully, God’s response to my prayers isn’t impeded by my lack of knowledge. Tim Keller recently said, “We can be sure our prayers are answered precisely the way we would want them to be answered if we knew everything God knows.”
In prayer, sometimes we ask God for things and we aren’t sure whether it’s His will or not. For instance, it may or may not be His will for us to get a specific job, for a mortgage to be approved, or to marry a certain person. Any of these things might be in line with His will, but they may not. We should go ahead and ask, because the Bible instructs us to “cast all of our cares upon Him.” (1 Peter 5:7) If we care about it, we should pray about it. But when we pray from the Scriptures, we don’t have to wonder whether it’s God’s will or not. His Word is always in line with His will.
For the last decade, there have been two things I’ve prayed for every day. I make a multitude of requests, but these two are constant. I know they are His will, because they come from His Word. Thankfully, prayer requests are unlimited. But if I were limited to only two, these would be it.
- I pray God I will love God with all my heart, mind, soul, and strength. And I pray I will love my neighbor as myself. (Mark 12:30). On occasion, I’ll meet someone honest enough to say she doesn’t love God the way she’d like to. The desire just isn’t there. If I could suggest one thing to anyone who wants a closer relationship with God, it would be to pray that He would plant in your chest a heart that loves Him above all things. Jesus said this was the greatest of all the commandments. But the desire must come from Him. I believe it’s a prayer He will always answer, because it’s His will for us to love Him more than anything else. When we love God and other people above all things, the rest of our priorities fall into alignment. Granted, none of us will love perfectly this side of heaven. But God can and will increase our love for Him in a way that dramatically changes our life. This is a crucial request, because we will never be happy or content apart from God. If you consistently ask God to increase your love for Him, God will woo you in ways you never thought possible.
- I pray God will continually increase my love for His Word. (Psalm 119:20). As a young woman in my twenties, the Scriptures put me back together in a way nothing else could. They still do. I need God’s Word more than I need my next meal. The Psalmist wrote, “If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.” (Psalm 119:92). Those words describe my relationship with the Scriptures better than any other. Without God’s Word, I’d be marinating in a gutter somewhere. I pray that God will continually rekindle my love for His Word and that His Word will be living and active in me (Hebrews 4:12). It’s impossible to know God apart from His Word, and we won’t spend time in His Word if we aren’t captivated by it.
I’ll leave you with words from my favorite writer, Flannery O’Connor, “God is feeding me and what I’m praying for is an appetite.”
