Matthew 6:5-13 When You Pray

Here's one of the things that makes prayer powerful: when you start praying in alignment with the will of God, guess what happens? Oh, this is audience participation. You can speak up. Nobody? Come on. Prayer gets answered, right? And it gets answered in big ways. Why? Because I'm not praying against the current. I'm flowing in the current. One of the most revolutionary things that I began to implement in my own prayer life is when people asked me, "Would you pray for me, Pastor?" I will actually stop first and ask God, "What do you want me to pray here?" And then I pray. And it's not always what they're asking for, but it's always what they need. And I've seen God do amazing things in my prayer life just from that simple step of stopping and saying, "What do you want me to pray? I don't want to be praying against your will. I want to be praying in harmony with your will because you've already got this figured out. Show me what I need to be praying. Adjust me. Adjust my mind. Adjust my thoughts."

Then he comes down to, "Give us this day our daily bread." He brings us to this point of provision. Most of us, if I dare say, and if we were honest, we start and stop at provision. And church lingo, sometimes the church prayer meeting is called the organ recital. And the reason it's called the organ recital is because prayer time at church often can just dive into, "Let's pray for so-and-so's knee. Somebody's got a bad heart. Somebody's got cancer. Somebody's got this." Those are all important things. We just don't move beyond that to where we're not praying for all the people who are perishing in our world. We're not praying for spiritual depth. We're not praying for the things that are the heart of God. Because I can pray for healing all day long, but the reality is anybody gets healed, still going to die. So am I really praying for the right things at times?

So we have to begin to seek the kingdom of God. In fact, what's interesting in this chapter, we'll get to it in a few weeks, Jesus said, "Hey, seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and then all these other things that you're consumed with will be added to you." Seek first the kingdom. But notice here, "Give us this day our daily bread." He didn't say ask for tomorrow's bread, next week's bread, next year's bread, two years from now is bread. Because part of what he's going to tell us later on in this chapter is, "Don't worry about tomorrow. There's enough worry for itself today. You can't handle tomorrow's worries today. All right. One day at a time. Give us today's bread. Give me what I need today."

Now here's the thing I want you to see about the pattern. The steps that he had us go through—first, before we ever asked for anything. The first step was to put God in the right place. "God, you are on the throne. You are my provider. You are the one who cares for me. You are the one who knows all of my needs. Hallowed be your name, God. I'm going to ask for things, but I don't want to ask for anything that is not in alignment with your will. And so your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."