Desperation a Prayer motivator?

1. Desperation a Prayer motivator? Love on its knees Matt 21:22 "And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive."

2. “You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than you pray until you have prayed”- John Bunyan • Some people pray just to pray and some people pray to know God. - Andrew Murray • You may pray for an hour and still not pray. You may meet God for a moment and then be in touch with Him all day. - Fredrik Wisloff

3. More quotes • Wishing will never be a substitute for prayer. - Ed Cole • Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tyre?- Corrie Ten Boom • The Third Petition of the Lord's Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone's will be done but their own.- Aldous Huxley • Our ordinary views of prayer are not found in the New Testament. We look upon prayer as a means for getting something for ourselves; the Bible idea of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself. - Oswald Chambers

4. Why do we struggle with prayer ? • Unforgiveness • "And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins." (Mark 11:25) We can actually prevent our own sins from being forgiven by refusing to forgive others. • Wrong Motives • "You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures." (James 4:2-3) This does not mean we cannot ask for our personal needs but we do need to examine our deepest motivations in our requests and dig out and repent of selfishness and greed.

5. Being Double-Minded • "But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does." (James 1:8) Asking clear specific stable prayers will yield results in opposition to the kind of prayer described here by a double-minded person. • Not knowing God's heart before asking • "This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us - whatever we ask - we know that we have what we asked of him." (I John 5:14-15) We can save ourselves a lot of grief by getting God's heart on a matter before launching a doomed prayer initiative.

6. Sin • "If I regard (meaning cherish) iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear." (Psalm 66:18) Sin can close down the communication lines between us and God. But let us read the next verses • Psalm 66:19-20 • but God has surely listened and heard my voice in prayer. Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me!

7. Pray then like this: • “Our Father in heaven” • We are His children not slaves or orphans • Galatians 4:7 • So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir. • John 15:15 "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.

8. So when we sing, 'Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord,' we are not thinking of the nearness of place, but of the nearness of relationship. It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence. We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts. - A.W. Tozer

9. We need to practise being in His presence • Luke 10:38-42 • As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" "Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

10. “Prayer does not fit us for the greater work, prayer is the greater work.” - Oswald Chambers • “The man who mobilizes the Christian church to pray will make the greatest contribution to world evangelisation in history.”  Andrew Murray