Anatomy of a Prayer
Monday, August 9th, 2010It seems that whenever we are looking at how to pray, we look toward Matthew 6, to what we call the Lord’s Prayer. This is a great example of prayer that is given to us from the mouth of Jesus. But I think when we only look at that particular prayer, we are forsaking a whole lot of other prayers that we can look at. One such prayer is found in Nehemiah 1. So lets look at some of the key elements of this prayer.
Worship:
Nehemiah’s prayer begins with worship of God. In verse 5, he says 5O LORD, God of heaven, the great and awesome God. Worship is an important element in prayer because it humbles us before the Lord. Raising up the Lord inevitably makes us lower. The higher he goes, the lower we become. It can’t happen any other way.
Confession:
Confession is the next crucial aspect of prayer. 6b I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s house, have committed against you. 7 We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees and laws you gave your servant Moses. Confession again forces us to examine ourselves compared to God. Confession is an admittance that we are not good enough for God. Confession says that we don’t deserve God. However, it also says that we are grateful for His grace.
Faith in God’s Promises:
Another important aspect of Nehemiah’s prayer is that he had TOTAL faith that God would answer his prayer. The key to having this kind of faith is to pray things that God has promised to us already. Ne 1:8-9 “Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, 9 but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.’ We have been promised a lot of very cool things, such as Forgiveness, Peace, Guidance…but we have not been promised a boat, or a really hot boyfriend/girlfriend, or to pass that test that we totally didn’t feel the need to study for. Will God give us these things? Maybe, maybe not, but if we pray for things that He promised to us, we can be 100% certain he will give us to them. Because God is faithful. And god is Truth. He cannot let a promise go unfulfilled because then god would be a liar.
Request:
It wasn’t until after this, that Nehemiah finally made his request to the Lord.
So with your next prayer, are you just going to ask for what you want, like God is a Genie that just can’t wait to lavish you with everything you could ever imagine, OR are you going to pray humbly for the multitude of things that God promised if we ask for them?
