When You Don’t Know What To Pray Series

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

ENGAGE

How many of you here this morning are 100% satisfied with your prayer life?

[Wait for answers]

Me neither.

TENSION

For most of us, when it comes to praying, I think there are two common problems that most of us deal with.

The first problem is a lack of a consistent prayer life when it comes to the things we know how to pray for.

There are some things in life that we know how to pray for because God has revealed those things to us in His Word.

• We know to pray for God to help us read the Bible on a consistent basis because we see how important that is throughout the Bible.

• We know to pray and confess our sins because the Bible instructs us to do that

• We know to pray and ask God for our daily needs because Jesus instructed His disciples to do that.

• We know to pray and ask God to help us resist temptation because Jesus told His disciples to pray for that.

• As husbands, we know to pray and ask God to help us love our wives as Christ loves the church.

• As fathers, we know to pray and ask God to help us bring our children up in the training and instruction of the Lord and to do that without exasperating them.

Even though I think we all have good intentions when it comes to praying for these things, our prayer life isn’t always as consistent as it should be. And ultimately, that is because for whatever reason, we just don’t give our prayer life the priority it deserves. And so we let the busyness of life distract us from praying about these matters.

I think all of us go through seasons like that. We just need to make sure that we don’t get stuck there.

But this morning, I want to address another way that we all struggle in our prayer life, and that is the issue of how to pray when we don’t know what to pray. There are some areas, particularly when it comes to the trials and difficulties that impact our lives, where it’s hard to pray because we don’t really know what to pray.

• When someone gets a terminal illness, do I pray for healing, or do I pray for God to be with that person in their journey to be with Him?

• When I’m having financial problems, do I pray for God to provide more resources, or do I pray for Him to help our family live within the means He has already provided?

• When I’m in a difficult situation at work, do I pray for God to provide a new job for me or do I pray for God to help me be a witness for Him in my present job?

There are a at least a couple of reasons that we just don’t know what to pray in these situations:

• First, I don’t know the future. I don’t know how these circumstances are going to affect me and others.

• Second, and probably more relevant, is the fact that I don’t really know what is best in these situations. I might know what I would prefer, but I’m just not in a position to know if that is God’s best.

TRUTH

Fortunately for us, this morning, we’re going to get some really practical guidance from Paul about how to pray when we don’t know what to pray.

We left off last week with verse 25 in Romans chapter 8. We’re right in the middle of a section of Paul’s letter where he is addressing the idea of what it means to suffer with Jesus.

Although we’re only going to cover 2 verses this morning, there is much for us to learn here. Will you go ahead and read the passage out loud with me this morning.

[Read Romans 8:26-27]

As I began to study this passage this week, I began by just writing down a long list of questions that it brought to my mind. And as I began to think about those questions and read some commentaries and other sermons, I found that there are a lot of differing ideas out there about how to answer a lot of those questions. So if all those people who are way smarter than I am can’t agree on the answers, I’m certainly in no position to claim that I have it all figured out.