For your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people bear your name! – Daniel 9:19

We get prayer the wrong way round. To us prayer is for us, or for our loved ones; it is for health or for help or for blessing. Even when we are being spiritual we pray for Christian maturity or for growth, but all this is still about us!

Our prayer should instead be all about God. Yes, it will involve talking about us and our loved ones, but only because their care has a bearing on who God is. Their care and wellbeing matters to Him.

We find God, and in Him we find forgiveness, and then rather than focus on Him we turn around and think we were righteous all the time. We become self righteous when all we can ever be is ‘Christ righteous’.

So, we need to make our prayer to be about God; about His will, His honour, His mercy. Rather than asking God to further our own ends – no matter how pious those ends are – let’s instead pray ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done’. Let’s ask God to build His Church, not because of our goodness, or even because of our need, but because the Church bears His name.

We seek Him for the advancement of His great name, for His wonderful purposes to be fulfilled. It is because of His great mercies that He will act. It is because of His name that He will not delay. Let us, therefore, make our prayer all about God and not about us.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2004 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Devotional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.