Prayer

If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. Matthew 21:22

I think we miss a crucial point in this. We know this verse, so we pray about a lot of things.

But I think we forget to ask.
I think we spend so much time praying over a situation that we forget to really ask God for something. And I think asking requires something more than a question mark. It requires acknowledging and understanding that you do not have. There is no point in asking if you already have it.

Acknowledging that you do not have requires humility. Asking the Lord for something requires a need. It requires confessing a need that we, ourselves, cannot meet. We do not like admitting that we cannot meet a need. We are okay when we pray about things are clearly not under our control. We pray for favor in an interviewer's eyes. We pray for open doors and direction when we aren't sure what to do. These are all good things to pray for. But they rarely require humility. Prayers with humility require an honest assessment of ourselves in the light of the situation. Prayers out of this assessment are the humble ones, the ones that require God to move. They require God to move because we have recognized that we cannot meet our own needs, sometimes in places that we feel that we should not need. Those are the hard prayers.

But it is in these hard prayers that we experience God's extravagant love for us. It is in these hard prayers that we find the Love of the One who came and dwelt among us.