Do you pray? And if you do pray, what is the major emphasis or focus of your prayers? Is it to somehow persuade God to do what you want or believe that you need? Or is it to learn what God wants you to do or be? Think deeply about this question because the answer reveals much about your understanding of the relationship that you have with the Father.
If the answer is that the vast majority, as I would say it is in most cases that I have observed, the focus of our prayers is to tell God what we want Him to do or ask Him for what we perceive we need, then our fundamental paradigm is that God exists to serve us and or please us.
What percentage of your prayers are focused on asking God what He wants and then listening and watching for His direction?
In reality we exist to serve and please Him. The most important feature of prayer is to hear Him and learn His will for our lives 24/7. He already knows what we need to do His will and He will never withhold it.
He didn’t create us and plant us here at this exact time so that we could make a great plan for our lives and share it with Him. This another modern, but completely backwards paradigm. Before He even created heaven and earth God created a plan and purpose for your life and mine. (Ephesians 2:8-10 et.al.) He established a way to communicate with Him to let us in on it and has given us His Spirit to empower us while we are here to do it.
Ultimately our success or failure during our tenure on planet Earth will be measured not by how much of our plan for our lives we accomplish, or how much of our parents plan for our lives we accomplish, or by what anyone else thinks we should be ot do, but by how much of God’s eternal plan for our lives we accomplish. Our performance will be judged on that basis alone. (See II Corintians 5:10, I Corinthians 3:11-15, Romans 14:10-12)
If we don’t use prayer as it is intended we can only accidentally find and do God’s will, we might just stumble into it once in a while. Who would trust something so important to and accident? Turn the paridigm around. Spend more time asking God to speak and listening for His answer than in telling Him what you perceive you need or want. Trust Him to be true in all He promises that can be summed up in this; “I will always have all I need to do all God wants.” This can change your life forever! And I do mean the real forever! LISTEN!
In his latest book, Buck Jacobs, founder of The C12 Group and author of I, Radical: God's Radical Business Through an Ordinary Man and A Light Shines Bright in Babylon: A Handbook for Christian Business Owners, offers a life-changing method for increased joy, wisdom, and intimacy with God.
