Prayer: Our Requests Up or God's Will Down?

• Bob's back surgery tomorrow
• My aunt Ruthie's mom's sister's uncle lost his job
• The youth bake sale this weekend
• 17 unspokens

This is an example of a "normal" prayer request list that I have grown up with since I was a kid but it is something that I have been convicted of lately personally. I just feel like the prayers that we lift up to God are very "me-centered". We like to look to God as our cosmic Santa Clause as someone once put it.  

Jonathan Leeman sums it up what prayer should be when he says "praying is how God's people should grab hold of His Word and align their will and their hopes with His." Yet, how often, whether intentionally or not, we try to coerce God to align His will with ours? How often do we use James 5:16 as a way of "naming it and claiming it" when it comes to prayers? How often do "you ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions?"

I think that our prayer lives individually as well as our prayer lives corporately as a church are a perfect reflection of the self-centered, self-hep, consumerism culture that we live in nowadays. We all want our "best life now". We all want to look out for number one. It is the way that we are programmed in the 21st century. Even when it comes to church services, we are all looking to get something out of the message to help ourselves.

Our prayers should have one purpose and one alone and that is God's glory and His will. Our prayers, I believe, are a great indication of what is in our heart. If we are praying for help with our job or physical healing or for money while neglecting to pray for the lost or for the Holy Spirit to work in our lives or that God's glory will be made known through our lives, then we are no different than non-Christians asking God for help when they need Him.

We need only to look to Jesus on how to prayer in Matthew 6 where he says plainly "Pray then like this" and goes on to pray "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. (Praying for God's glory first and foremost) Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (Ultimately, we want God's will not ours) Give us this day our daily bread (Pray for the necessities of life) and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. (Repent of our sins) And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. (Keep us from sin).

Now let me conclude this by clarifying that I in no way am saying that it is bad to pray for someone to be healed or for someone to find a job. We are supposed to lift our requests to God in prayer and we are supposed to pray for each other. However, when our entire prayers are focused on what we want and what we need, I think that our prayers have gone awry. Lord, help my prayers to be Your will down and not my requests up.