We have all done it. We have prayed a prayer so many times that we think that we have become a broken record. We pray and pray, hoping and believing that God will answer, but as time goes on the answer never seems to come. It can become disheartening — to hope, long and pray for something that God never brings. Sometimes, we start to wonder if we should have ever started praying for that thing at all. Sometimes, we even start to think that God doesn’t care about this thing that we are praying for. Rather then getting lost in thinking these thoughts, maybe we need to start asking ourselves what is it that we are really praying for?
It is simple sometimes, maybe even easy, to pray a prayer that God lays on our heart, but to ask ourselves why it is that we even want to pray for it. That is a journey all on its own, to take a moment to look inside ourselves, to look at our wants and desires, in order to find our why it is that we are praying for something, can be a rather hard thing to do. It means looking at the core of our wants and facing them, finding out if our wants are pure or selfish. Whether or not we truly know why we are asking for something. If what we are praying for is truly that which we want, or are we wanting something that is much deeper. When we take the time to search ourselves in order to find out why we are praying the prayers that we are praying, we open up a way to let God into our prayers.
When we allow God into our prayers God is able to guide us through them, showing us why we are desiring such prayers, why it is that we keep asking God for the same thing over and over again. God may end up showing us something that we never thought that we where missing, something that we may never would have asked for. It may even be that we a settling for something because we don’t feel worthy enough to ask for something bigger. What ever it may be, taking the time to let God search our prayers is that best way to find out why some of our prayer sound like a broken recorded.
~ Pastor Jillian