#129: P.R.A.Y

Praying consistently will change your life. Today we will be using the acronym P-R-A-Y. If you can spell the word pray, hopefully you will be able to remember how to make your prayer life more effective, and you will be inspired to pray more consistently. In fact, many of the blessings God wants you to enjoy will never be realized unless you pray.

I think all Christians know they are supposed to pray, and all Christians want to pray. But many of God’s people, if they are completely frank and transparent about the issue, would have to admit their prayer life is somewhere between mediocre and non-existent.

P- Praise

Psalm 100 helps us understand the first letter, “P”, in the word P-R-A-Y, which stands for praise. Psalm 100:1-4 states it well,

Make a joyful shout to the LORD, all you lands! Serve the LORD with gladness; come before His presence with singing. Know that the LORD, He is God; it is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; we are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.

R- Repentance

The second letter of our acronym, “R”, which stands for repent.

By repentance in prayer, I mean taking the time before God to search your heart and repent of anything that has come between you and Him. Psalm 19:12-13 expresses it well,

Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of great transgression.

Verse 12 begins with the question, “Who can understand his errors?” The psalmist is telling us, “You will not always know when you do something wrong. You will not always know when you get into an area that is not right.”

How do you deal with these sins? You come before God and say, “God, put the spotlight on anything in my life that has raised a barrier between You and me, and I will repent of it.”

So when you pray, ask God to reveal any sin in your life you may be overlooking. God will honor your heart of repentance.

A-Asking  

When your heart is clean after repenting, you can have confidence before God when you ask. As 1 John 3:21-22 says,

Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence toward God. And whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do those things that are pleasing in His sight.

In Matthew 7:7-11, Jesus tells us,

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!”

Pretty clear, isn’t it? God loves you and wants the very best for you. Be careful not to water down the words of Jesus, or somehow try and explain them away or complicate them. He meant just what He said.

Y- Yield 

Psalm 37:4 says,

Delight yourself also in the LORD, and He shall give you the desires of your heart.

Now the Hebrew word for delight in this verse literally means to become soft or pliable. This means that “delighting” in the Lord is assuming a yielded posture before God.

So the “Y” in P-R-A-Y stands for yield. The question is: How do you practice yielding to God when you pray? Yielding is when you stop talking, and you wait, listen, and seek to hear from God.

In my own practice of prayer, I will often bow before God and ask Him, “God, is there anything You want to say to me? Do You have any instructions for me? Is there anything You want me to change?”. Then I silently wait for Him to speak to me.

You will indeed hear from God if you ask Him to speak into your heart, and wait silently before Him.

LORD help us to P-R-A-Y effectively.