Connecting with God
Matthew 6:5 MSG
God loves it when we come to Him in prayer. It’s an opportunity for us to share our concerns, listen to His voice, and connect with Him on a deeper level. But sometimes we pray for all the wrong reasons. Let’s take a look at some: 1) Misdirected prayers. If we’re annoyed at someone we can communicate our frustrations through our prayers. We might pray out loud about the person who has annoyed us, in the hope that they realise just how much they’ve hurt or upset us. 2) Performance prayers. We can find ourselves praying in order to show other people how holy we are. We reel off long, wordy prayers which make us look and feel superior to others. But the Bible says: ‘When you come before God, don’t turn that into a theatrical production.’ 3) Judgmental prayers. In these prayers we judge others and think that we know better than God. Maybe someone’s prayer hasn’t be answered, and we ask God to change the person because we think they’re the problem. This is us judging others and trying to figure things out on God’s behalf. 4) Faithless prayers. Sometimes we can be tempted to think that we need to pray with a big group of people if we want God to answer us. But with God, what matters is the faith we have when we pray, not the number of people. So how can we pray the right way? Matthew 6 gives us some insights: ‘When you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father in private’ (v.6 NLT). We need to be coming to God with humility and expectancy. And we need to make sure we’re coming to God with the right motive – to spend time with Him. What Now? Take the prayer advice in Matthew 6. Go to a quiet place by yourself and spend some time talking and listening to God.