A Better Way to Pray

Jesus had a lot to say about prayer, but the first thing He said was a warning. He talked about people who loved to pray. That sounds like a good thing until you hear why they loved it.

And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place. For your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him.

Matthew 6:5-8 (NKJV)

Notice what Jesus put His finger on. Not the posture. Not the words. The motive. They prayed to be seen. And that one line tells you something most of us have never slowed down to consider: why you pray is more important than what you pray or how you pray.

The heart behind the words

The difference between the right way to pray and the wrong way to pray is your motivation. God is far more interested in your heart than He is in your vocabulary. He is not grading your sentences. He is reading the thing underneath them.

So here is a hard question. If you believe that it is your prayer that makes God move in your life, then something in your praying is already off. The reason there are so many unanswered prayers is not that God is stingy. It is that there is so much wrong motive underneath the asking.

Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.

James 4:1-3 (NKJV)

You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss. The problem was never God's willingness. The problem was a heart trying to use God as a supplier for its own appetite.

God is not waiting to be talked into it

Here is the belief that quietly runs so much of our praying. We believe that God can do anything, but deep down we suspect He has actually done nothing. So prayer becomes the tool we use to finally get God to do something.

Follow that logic and see where it lands. If prayer is how I get God to respond to my desire, then prayer is really a contest of desire. Whoever wants it more, whoever can push harder, whoever can gather more people to agree, wins. If two people pray against each other, God simply measures whose longing is stronger and answers that one. That is nonsense. That is not the God of the Bible.

Because God has already done it. He has already blessed you. He has already favored you. He has already delivered you. So prayer does not move God toward me and my desires. Prayer moves me and my desires to where God has already moved.

Then Jesus answered and said to them, Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.

John 5:19 (NKJV)

When Jesus prayed, He prayed from what He had already seen the Father do. He received on earth what was already finished in heaven. That is a better way to pray: releasing your faith to receive what you can see God has already done for you. And because it is a faith action, and faith works through love, real prayer is motivated by love. You will never pray properly until you know how much God loves you and how much He has already done.

Salvation shows you the pattern

Take the biggest thing of all. God has saved everybody. He has forgiven everybody's sin in Jesus. He has healed, He has paid for every transgression. And yet not everybody is saved. Why? Because not everybody has believed it to be true. The provision is finished. The receiving is not.

When the jailer asked what he must do to be saved, the answer was simply, believe. Believe what? Believe that God has already done it, that your sins are already forgiven. So when you lead someone in a prayer to receive Christ, that is not the moment God saves them. That is the moment they receive what God did two thousand years ago.

I once heard Andrew Wommack tell of a woman brought to him to be saved. She said she had asked Jesus to save her a hundred times and still felt no assurance. He led her again, then asked, Are you saved? She said, I don't know. So he took her to the Scripture itself.

If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Romans 10:9, 13 (NKJV)

Are you a whosoever? Yes. Have you called on the name of the Lord? Yes. Then are you saved? And she still said, I don't know. Now, none of us would respond by saying, We don't understand why God hasn't saved her yet, let's join hands and pray until He finally moves. No. That is not the issue at all. God has already done it. Her only need was to receive what was already true.

Everything the same way

Here is the good news. Everything God does for us, He did the same way He did our salvation. He did it in Christ Jesus, before we were even born. Which means prayer is how you receive by faith what you can see God has already done for you in Jesus.

Say you are sick and need healing. God has already healed.

Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness — by whose stripes you were healed.

1 Peter 2:24 (NKJV)

So the prayer is not, God, look at this sickness, do something, please do something. The prayer is, Father, I thank You that two thousand years ago Jesus bore my sin and my pain and my sickness, and by His wounds I was healed. So in the name of Jesus, I receive my healing now.

Say the enemy is oppressing you, tormenting you. You do not have to jump and sweat and do gymnastics to get free. Look at what is already yours.

He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.

Colossians 1:13-14 (NKJV)

Can you see now why real prayer is always full of thanksgiving? And whatever you are believing for — a job, a spouse, provision — the pattern holds. His divine power has already given you all things that pertain to life and godliness.

As His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises.

2 Peter 1:3-4 (NKJV)

Beware those who sell you what you already own

If you don't seem to have it right now, it is one of three things. Your eyes are blinded to it. Someone has stolen it or is trying to. Or you have it and you simply don't know it. What it never means is that God has withheld it.

So be careful of the charlatans and the wolves in sheep's clothing who call themselves men of God and come to cheat you out of your inheritance with cock-and-bull stories. They are trying to make you pay for something your Father has already given you for free.

As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, abounding in it with thanksgiving. Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit. For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him.

Colossians 2:6-10 (NKJV)

This is praying His will

Go back to where Jesus started. When you pray, go to your Father, who already knew what you needed before you asked, and who has already made the provision. That is the confidence we pray from.

Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.

1 John 5:14-15 (NKJV)

That is what it means to pray according to the will of God. In His grace He has already provided everything you need, because that is what a good Father does. Your prayer, then, is simply to express in your life what He has already done.

So the next time you kneel, do not start by begging. Start by thanking. Find what God has said He has already done for you in Jesus, look at it until you can see it, and then open your hands and receive it. That is a better way to pray.