Good morning, ladies. I trust everyone slept well? Maybe? Sort of? It is a hotel, it's not home? Well last night we looked at who we pray to or to whom do we pray. And looking at God and His power and the position He holds as our Father. And why we can come boldly, as we just sang, come boldly to the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

So we've seen who it is that we are praying to. Today we're going to look at why we pray. How we pray. We know that we come boldly because we have been reconciled to Him. Our entrance into that throne room is ensured through the perfect work of Jesus' life, His death, and His resurrection.

It's through those things, through Him coming as a man, through Him dying upon the cross, that we have become His children. That we have been adopted as His children. And so as His children we know that He is going to respond to us as our loving Father. He's going to hear our requests.

And it says even in Psalms that as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him. So knowing who God is, His power, His ability to work His purposes, knowing that He is our loving Father, that He is our friend, that is what enables us to pray.

That's how we come boldly into the throne of grace. And it also propels us to prayer. When you think about human relationships, when you have a good friend, do you call them up because you have to? Do you spend time with them and take time out of your schedule and the other things that you're doing to spend time with your friend because it's a duty?

Because you have to? No! We spend time with our friends and our loved ones because we want to. We enjoy sharing our lives with them. We enjoy telling them what happened in our day. We enjoy talking to them about our problems. And so far more than just a human friend or loved one, God actually has the ability to speak into our lives with power, with the ability to change.

But we also approach Him as our Father, and sometimes it is just about telling Him about our day, isn't it? It's not necessarily that something needs to change, but just this is what's going on, relating that to the Lord. So knowing that God is our Father propels us to the throne room where we want to spend time with Him.

It isn't a duty. In order for us to have that relationship, something had to happen, didn't it? We talked about the life and death and resurrection of Christ, that it is through that that we can come boldly. Well, why was that necessary? Well, it was necessary because our sin caused conflict and a broken relationship with God.

Because of our sin, our relationship with God that we saw in the garden when God created Adam and Eve, and it says they walked with Him in the cool of the day. What were they doing? They were sharing life with God. But when Adam and Eve sinned, that fellowship was broken.

And that chasm was so great between us and God because of our sin that there was only one thing that could bridge that gap, and that was the death of Christ. When you think about reconciliation as far as, again, our human relationships go, when is reconciliation needed? It's when that relationship has broken down.

So we know that our relationship was broken with God because of our sin, but our relationships can break between us and other people for all kinds of reasons. And how do we fix that? Through reconciliation. And that can look a lot of different ways, can't it? Maybe we've offended that person and we need to do something to show our remorse and make it up to them.

We could never make up to God the offense that our sin is against Him. If we lived our entire lives with the sole purpose of somehow trying to make it up to God for our sin against Him, we would not be able to accomplish it. Nothing that we could ever do would make it right.

It amazes me that God didn't choose to just write us off. He wasn't under any obligation to fix the relationship that we broke with Him. But God's Word tells us that God so loved us that He sent His precious, beloved Son to die for us. That's how important a relationship with us is in God's eyes.

That He was willing to pay such a high price to bring reconciliation with us. Not that God needs us. He does not need us in any way, shape, or form. But He is love. God is love. God isn't a loving God. God is love. That is who He is.

And so He chose, out of the good pleasure of His will, to send His Son to bring us back into fellowship with Him. That's what our reconciliation means. Last year, I had the opportunity to go to the Together for the Gospel conference for women. And Timothy Keller was talking about this exact issue of our relationship with God.

And he said, "Prayer is friendship with God." God is a God of relationship. We see that even within the Trinity. God has a relationship within the Godhead between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so when it says that God made us in His image, He made us to be relational beings.

And He made us, He created us, to have a relationship with Him. That's that relationship we saw in the Garden of Eden. Where Adam and Eve walked and talked with God in the cool of the day. That was the relationship that He designed us to have. But that relationship was broken by our sin.

And so when Jesus accomplished our reconciliation through His death, it was so much more than delivering us from the punishment our sin deserved. I think sometimes when we think about our salvation, we think, "Okay, I was condemned. My sin, the punishment of it was for me to die eternally, to be in hell.

And God, through His Son and the death on the cross, delivered me from that punishment." And that is absolutely and completely biblical and true. But that is not the full extent of our reconciliation with God, of the salvation He's given us. That's just the beginning of the process. So through that reconciliation, what do we have now?

We have a relationship with God. We no longer have this chasm, this conflict that has been caused by our sin. When Jesus' blood covered our sin, it made peace with God. That peace was that first step in bringing us back into relationship with God. So now we're able to communicate with God that we are at peace with God, we can share our lives with Him.

And yet so often, we don't take advantage of that. When we come boldly to the throne of grace, it's only for help in time of need. We don't go to Him as our friend and talk to Him about the incredible things He's doing in our lives and the things that we're struggling with, the things that are causing us pain.

Talking to Him as our friend and as our Father. Psalm 16, verse 11, David says, "You will show me the path of life. In Your presence is fullness of joy, and at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore." Sometimes we tend to separate those pleasures from the presence of God.

We think about the things God can do for us, but we miss the fact that the greatest pleasure He gives us is the fact that we can be in the presence of God. It says, "In Your presence is fullness of joy." That is where our deepest delight, our greatest joy should be, is the fact that we are friends with God.

We can come to God not just as our powerful Creator, not just as our Redeemer and our Savior, but as our friend. As our Daddy that we run to and we have that intimate relationship with. A reconciliation means that we get to share our lives with God. He's our beloved friend and confident.

We can share our deepest delight being in His presence. He is our perfect, faithful friend. A lot of us have friends that we call our best friends, our good friends. But no matter how good a friend you have, that friend is also a sinner just like you. And there's times that our friends, no matter how good a friend they are, they let us down.

Whether it's because they sin against us, or maybe they just don't fulfill our expectation. Maybe they promise to do something and we're not able to fulfill that promise. That does not describe God. God is our perfect, faithful friend. We talked last night that if He says He will do something, He will cause it to come to pass.

We can trust that. He is our perfect friend. Derek Kigner describes biblical friendship as "candor and constancy." What does that mean? Well, "candor" is not a word we use a whole lot these days. But it means transparency, honesty. You can't be friends with someone if they're not sharing with you who they are.

Can you imagine having a friend that isn't willing to tell you their favorite color, their favorite kind of food, their hobbies, the things they like to do in their spare time? They're opening up to you who they are, what they think about different subjects. That's "candor." But there's a depth of friendship that goes beyond acquaintanceship.

Do you have friends that are willing to tell you when you've offended them? A friend that tells you, "You know, you said this the other day, but I can't really agree with that." A friend that's willing to tell you when they see you walking a dangerous path, when they see you making decisions that are not honoring to God.

Do you have friends that are willing to be that transparent with you? Do you have friends that you're willing to go to and say, "I am struggling in this area. I need you to keep me accountable. I need you to pray for me." That's transparency, showing who you really are, not just our best face.

That's acquaintanceship. We are acquainted with that person. But to be friends with someone means being real with each other, and not just transparent, not just that candor, but also that constancy. And this is where we depend on Christ, because we are not constant, are we? We are faithless. We don't always keep our promises.

We want to seek after God with all our heart, but in reality, we get distracted. We get caught up in things we want to do, and we don't give God his rightful place. But He is always constant. So biblical friendship involves candor, that transparency, and constancy, faithfulness, unchangingness. That is God.

He is our perfect friend. He will always be honest and transparent with us. And in return, we need to do the same. And in some ways, this kind of seems like an obvious, "Well, of course." Because as we talked about last night, God sees everything about us, right? There's nothing that happens to us that He doesn't see.

In Psalm 139, and I love that whole psalm. We're going to look at just a few verses right now. But Psalm 139 starts out in verse 1. "O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought afar off.

You comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, You know it all together." Does this create in you a joy that God knows you that well? Or is your response one of concern and fear?

What do you mean, "God knows me all together? He sees my thoughts afar off?" That means before you even realize you're thinking it, God knows you're going to think it. How does that make you feel? It should give us such a joy and a confidence and a security. But it can only give us that joy if we recognize our position in Christ.

If you're concerned that there's things in your life that would cause God to turn from you, then that's going to cause you a lot of anxiety. But if you recognize the fact that your position with God is not earned by you, that it has been freely given to you through the blood of Jesus Christ, then you recognize the fact that just as God knows everything inside of you, none of it surprises Him.

He knew every single bit of that evil was there when He chose you and He adopted you. He isn't surprised. Sometimes we can do things that shock even ourselves, and not in a good way. God is never shocked, not just by the things we do, but the things He sees going on inside us that no one else will ever see or know about.

The deepest, darkest parts of your heart, God sees those places, and He does not affect the way He feels about you. That should prompt you to be transparent with God. When you come to God in your prayers, it shouldn't be you putting on your good face, "Okay, I'm going to go talk to God now." Kind of like we would go to an important person or a job interview, "Okay, I'm going to really carefully pick out my outfit, make sure my hair looks just right." That should not be how we approach our God in prayer.

He already knows all the messy stuff. Bring it to Him. Be honest about it as you come to Him in prayer. Jeremiah 17, 9 and 10 says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." Who can know it? Do you know that we don't even know our own hearts?

There are things we are capable of that are beyond our imagination, but God knows. God sees all of that. He searches our hearts, and He knows us, and He does not turn away. Why? Why doesn't God turn away from us? Because as wicked and despicable as we are, He is perfectly holy and righteous.

That's what caused that separation in the first place. The only way that God can look at us and not turn from our sin is the blood of Jesus Christ. Because our relationship is based not on what we do, good or bad, but it's based on the life and the death of Jesus Christ, our relationship with Him will not change.

There will not come a day where God goes, "I think I made a mistake. I sought you out. I adopted you. But I think you just don't quite fit into the family of God." No. Your adoption is eternally secure. Nothing you ever do will cause God to turn from you.

If you are His child, and He has made you alive in Him, nothing will ever cause Him to turn from you. Timothy Keller says it this way, "When I forget that I am justified by faith alone, I give place to guilt and regret about the past. I therefore live in bondage to idols of power and money that make me feel better about myself.

When I forget I am being sanctified through the presence of God's Holy Spirit, I give up on myself. Stop trying to change. When I forget the hope of my future resurrection, I become afraid of aging and death. When I forget my adoption into the family of God, I become full of fears.

I don't pray with candor. I lose my confidence. I try to hide my faults from God." Makes sense, doesn't it? If you're afraid that you've done something or thought something or felt something so terrible that if God knew, He would kick you out of the family of God, you're not going to be honest with Him.

And it's so foolish of us because He already knows. And not only does He already know, but He still loves us. Nothing can change that because His love for us is not sourced in our lovable-ness. It's sourced in the character of God. He is love. So much love that He sent His Son to pay the penalty of our sin so that He can bring us into fellowship with Him.

He already knows what we're thinking and feeling. So when we pray, we don't need to put a good face on it, do we? If you want to turn to Psalm 13, we're going to look at a prayer. This is a prayer of David. And as we'll talk about even more tomorrow, prayer is such a wonderful place to go when you're learning about prayer, when you're learning about the nature and the character of God.

Because David is very real and open in his prayers. Psalm 13. This is David. He's called a man after God's own heart. He loves God, and this is how he comes to Him. How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?

How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? How long will my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and hear me, O Lord my God. Enlighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death. Lest my enemies say I have prevailed against Him.

Lest those who trouble me rejoice when I am moved. But I have trusted in your mercy. My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because He has dealt bountifully with me. This is David approaching God in prayer. This is one example. Not all of his prayers are like this.

But this is David being honest and open and transparent with God. He is in pain. He is angry and frustrated. He does not understand why God is not working on his behalf. Can we come to God and gloss all of that over? I cannot express this to God because I do not want Him to see that I am angry with Him.

I do not want Him to see that I am frustrated. God already knew. So by coming in this open, honest way before God, David is sharing who he is. He is pouring out his heart to God and saying, "God, I do not understand. Why?" But do you see where he ends up at the end of his song?

As he comes before God, he is angry and his emotions are roiling. He just does not understand. He is frustrated. But as he sits before God and pours out his heart, he starts to rehearse to himself the things God has already done. Do you see? He does not say, "You are going to deal bountifully with me." He says, "I will sing to the Lord because He has dealt bountifully with me." It is important that we rehearse to ourselves the faithfulness of God.

Not just the faithfulness that we see in His Word when He deals with His people, but the faithfulness of how He deals with us. How often do we bring our requests to the Lord and He answers our prayers, and we forget to go back and thank Him. And the next time something comes along and we are struggling and we are frustrated because God is not answering what we want Him to, we are like David at the beginning of the song.

Why? Like David, we have to come back to what we know in God's Word. God has dealt bountifully with us. We can sing to Him as we remember who He is, that His purposes are going to be accomplished, and that as our Father, His purposes include the very best for us.

How can we not sing to the Lord and rejoice in His salvation if we are brought back to that place of remembering the faithfulness of God? Of not allowing our feelings to carry us to a place where we are doubting God, where we no longer trust God, but where we allow the truth of who He is and how He deals with us to inform our emotions.

To go, "Okay, I'm feeling this way. I'm feeling this frustration and this anger." Or, "Change my heart. Remind me of who you are. Remind me of your faithfulness and how you have dealt with me." David is honest when he comes to God in prayer. He's open with God about his feelings, but he always comes back to the truth of who God is.

You know, somehow I doubt that his circumstance changed between verse 4 and verse 5. Those enemies that would rejoice if he fell, I don't think they suddenly went away. They're still there. But he's trusting in the faithfulness of God. His circumstance has not changed, but he went from anger and frustration to worship and adoration because he remembered who God was.

And when we remember who God is and we magnify Him in our vision, recognizing how much larger He is than any situation in our lives, it gives us a new perspective, doesn't it? That problem's still there, and we're still crying out to God to change it. But we also are recognizing how much larger God is than that problem.

How much He has already given us. That our salvation is secure no matter what happens to us in this life. We have eternity with God to look forward to. It changes our perspective. It puts our problems into their proper place rather than being so enormous that even though they're tiny and right here, it blocks our vision of God who's so much bigger.

We have to bring Him close so we see how small and insignificant our problem is in the light of His power. J.I. Packer said of knowing God, "That knowing God is more important than knowing about Him. It is a matter of dealing with Him as He opens up to you and being dealt with by Him.

Friends open their hearts to each other by what they say and do." We must not lose sight of the fact that knowing God is an emotional relationship as well as an intellectual and volitional one, and could not indeed be a deep relationship between persons if it were not so.

Sometimes we get so focused on the facts of who God is that we tend to separate the fact that He's our Father. We all know as women our relationships with our fathers are never without emotion. Whether it's good emotion, bad emotion, a mixture, we have very strong emotions when it comes to our fathers.

Our relationship with God is not an unemotional one. Our emotions have everything to do with our relationship with God. We see that with David as he cries out in his frustration, and now we're going to see it with David as he comes before God in repentance of his sin.

You can turn to Psalm 51. We're going to read through this. As we already talked about, David is called a man after God's own heart. I think that's really interesting because he was such a flawed man. He was a king over Israel, but he was also a murderer, an adulterer, sometimes a coward.

I love that because it shows us that his relationship with God was not based on what he did. It was based on his relationship with God. In Psalm 51, David has been confronted with his sin of adultery and murder. While his country was at war, David sat at home in his palace.

While he sat at home in his palace, he looked out a window and he saw a beautiful woman bathing. He was not a gentleman and did not turn the other way. This woman was the wife of one of his trusted men, not just even a foot soldier, but a man who was a trusted leader in David's army.

He was out faithfully serving his country and his king. But when David saw his wife, he took her and he committed adultery with her. All this time, her husband is away at war and she sends word to David and says, "I'm pregnant." David's response to that is to try and bring her husband home and cover it up and make him think it's his child.

But her husband was so honorable that he said, "I will not spend time with my wife and have intimate relations with her and enjoy our marriage when all of my men are out at the front fighting for our king." And so he slept outside the door of his house.

So David gave up and he sent him back to the battle. But when he sent this man back, he sent him with a written message to his general. And the message was that the general was to send this man to the very front of the line and then to have all the other men fall back.

That's what David did. And God sent a prophet to him and said, "Do you think I don't see?" I told him a story that caused David to become so angry about an injustice that he wanted to kill a man for killing a sheep. And God told him, "That's you.

You're the one." And at this point, David doesn't make excuses. He doesn't try and find some way of, "Oh well, it's understandable that I did this thing." He is broken before God as he recognizes his sin and he asks God for repentance. He doesn't gloss it over. He says, "Lord, against you and you only have I sinned." Let's read Psalm 51.

"Have mercy on me, O God, according to your lovingkindness, according to the multitude of your tender mercies blot out my transgression. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgression and my sin is always before me. Against you and you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight, that you may be found just when you speak and blameless when you judge.

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me. Behold, you desire truth in the inward parts and in the hidden part you will make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.

Make me hear joy and gladness that the bones you have broken may rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence and do not take your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me by your generous spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners shall be converted to you. Deliver me from guilt and bloodshed, O God, the God of my salvation, and my tongue shall sing aloud of your righteousness.

O Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall show forth your praise, for you do not desire sacrifice or else I would give it. You do not delight in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart. These, O God, you will not despise.

Do good in your pleasure to Zion. Build the walls of Jerusalem. Then you shall be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness. With burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings, then they shall offer bowls on your altar. Do you notice that as David admits his sin, is honest with his depravity before God, what does he say?

Does he say, "I'm going to try better, God. Tomorrow's a new day and I'm going to never do this again." There's nothing like that in the psalm. He implores God to change him. He says, "You wash me. You purge me. Create in me a clean heart." David recognizes that we are powerless in the face of sin.

We have no ability to fight sin on our own. It has to be God who comes in and takes away our sin by His blood and with His Spirit creates us in the image of Christ. Do you know that He tells us He's going to conform us into the image of His Son?

Did you know that God is making you like Himself? We can't do it. We cannot, no matter how hard we try, make ourselves godly, make ourselves more kind, make ourselves more loving, keep ourselves from temptation. We cannot do it. It has to be God that comes and cleanses us and creates a new heart within us, a heart that reflects His character.

We should never, ever put on a mask when we come to God in prayer. Whether it's sin in our lives, whether it's frustration against Him because He hasn't answered what we think He should have answered, share those emotions with God and rehearse the faithfulness of God. Remember who He is and that no matter whether it's sin or pain or suffering, God is so much bigger than any of it.

And so even in the midst of suffering and pain, in the midst of problems and trials, as David, we can sing to the Lord because He is powerful. He is our Father. He is faithful, and He will work all things together for our good. In His timing, not ours, but we can rest in His faithfulness.

Just as with David, God is always faithful to forgive us when we confess and repent of our sin. We will never, ever fail so badly that God takes away our adoption. We are His children. And the reason our relationship doesn't change, even in the midst of our failures, is because it is not the things we do that cause us to be adopted.

It's the blood of Jesus Christ. His blood is what gives us adoption. Titus 3, verses 3-7, "Say, for we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us." Not that He saw something in us that was worth saving.

Not of any works of righteousness, but according to His mercy. He washed us, He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit. Verse 6, "Whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by His grace, we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life." That is our hope.

We have an eternal inheritance with Jesus because we are His sisters. We have been adopted into the family of God, and not as a second-rate child. It says we are co-heirs with Christ. We have an inheritance waiting for us in heaven that is not going to change. So how does all of this relate to why and how we pray?

Well, prayer is a means by which we deepen our relationship with God. When you want to strengthen or deepen a friendship, what do you do? You spend time with that person. You get to know them better. You learn about each other. You learn about them and you share about yourself, and your relationship becomes stronger and deeper and more intimate.

That's what prayer is for us. We are in a relationship with God. If you are His child and you have received the gift of salvation that comes through the blood of Jesus Christ, you have a relationship with God. Do you want that relationship to just remain superficial? Is it enough that you are saved from hell and you have an inheritance?

Don't you want to know more deeply and intimately the God who has saved you? Through the blood of Jesus Christ, He has purchased that privilege for you. Prayer is the way we exercise that. Prayer is not a way to earn favor with God. That's how a lot of religions and sometimes even Christianity can view prayer.

If I pray enough and I pray hard enough and I say all the right words, God's going to answer my prayer. Prayer is not a way to earn God's favor. You have God's favor because of the work Jesus has done. Prayer is a conversation with God. And while we do and we should bring our petitions to God, that's not the end all of prayer.

That's not even its main purpose. The primary reason that we spend time in prayer is to spend time in the presence of God. E.M. Bowne said, "God draws mightily near to the praying soul to see God, to know God, and to live for God. These form the objective of all true praying.

Thus, praying is, after all, inspired to seek after God. Prayer desire is inflamed to see God, to have clearer, fuller, sweeter, and richer revelation of God." Is this how we approach prayer? Do we go to prayer going, "I just want to know more of who God is. I just want to spend time in His presence, reveling in what He has done, looking at who He is, the incredible character of God"?

So many times when we first fall in love, we sit around and just think about that person and how wonderful they are. And we sit there and we gaze at them and, "Oh, they're so handsome," and, "Oh, they do this," and, "Oh, they're that." Do we ever have anything close to that when it comes to God?

Do we ever sit there and just be enamored with who He is? The amazing, loving, generous nature of God. His imagination in nature and how He has created the world around us. The works of His hands. How He works in our lives in incredible ways. When I was up at college, I had a roommate, and I'll never forget one morning she came in and she had gotten up and she was on her way to the cafeteria for breakfast.

She goes, "Man, I have the worst craving for biscuits and gravy." But they just made that like four days ago. Like, there's no way they're going to have it for breakfast. I'm so disappointed because I just have this craving and all I want for breakfast is biscuits and gravy.

And I'm not really a breakfast person, so I was slowly getting ready while they went off to breakfast, and she comes back and she said, "I can't believe it. Guess what they had for breakfast?" They had biscuits and gravy. That is our God. That right there is a little tiny miracle that God did that had no internal significance.

It didn't impact her work in ministry. It was God saying, "I want to bless my daughter with biscuits and gravy this morning." That's your God. Do you ever see the works He's doing in your life? And just go, "Wow, I can't believe you did that. Thank you." We need to spend that time reveling in our God.

That's what our prayer life should be. Even as we have those moments of pain and need where we're coming to Him and pouring out our heart, there should also be times where we just rejoice in who He is, what He has done. I think most of us have a person in our life that we have a relationship with.

It could be a family member, a co-worker. And it seems like the only time that they take time to talk to us is when they need something. They never want to just spend time and chat or go do a fun activity. But if they need money, if they need help with something, they're going to come talk to you.

That's a really nasty feeling, isn't it? You can tell they don't really want to have a relationship for you for the fact of sharing their life with you. You're just someone they go to when they need something. And yet, how often is that how we interact with God? "I'm busy.

I don't have time, Lord. I can't read your Word today." "I have five minutes. I can give you five minutes, God." Until we need something. How sad is that? And yet, God doesn't sit there and hold it against us and go, "Excuse me. You haven't come and just sat and talked with me for a week, and now you're going to come and ask me for something?" That's not how God deals with us.

But how much do we miss out when we don't take advantage of the privilege of a relationship with Him and sitting at His feet? And it shows, too, where our thoughts are in relation to God. Timothy Keller said, "We know God is there, but we tend to see Him as a means through which we get things to make us happy." "For most of us, He has not become our happiness." "We therefore pray to procure things not to get to know Him better." That's really sad.

Mostly it's sad for us, because we're the ones that miss out on the blessing and the joy of sitting in God's presence. Acts 2:28 says, "You have made known to me the ways of life. You will make me full of joy in Your presence." Even in the midst of very difficult life circumstances, we can have deep and abiding joy if we have come to treasure God for Himself, and enjoy spending time in His presence, just to be with Him, not to accomplish some purpose or to get something we want, but because we enjoy being with Him.

So as we've looked at so far, we know that God has the power to effect change, as we talked about. We know that as our Father, He's going to respond to our prayers. And today we looked at how prayer is a precious privilege that's granted to us through the reconciliation accomplished by Jesus, and that our prayers should be sincere conversation, whether it's sincerely happy, sincerely sad, frustrated, angry, joyful, whatever it is, it should be sincere.

Because even if you put on a mask, God's going to see right past it. In light of all of this, as we approach prayer, are there things that can be practical guides for us? We are definitely a to-do culture, are we not? There's a to-do for that, and a YouTube video for this, and it'll tell you how to do it.

Well, there isn't that kind of a to-do list for prayer, but we do have the Psalms. The Psalms are examples for us of men that have gone before and prayed, the inspired words that God has preserved in His Word to show us how to pray. Always, our prayers must be informed by the Word of God, by the truth that He reveals to us in His Word.

As we talked about yesterday, so often you'll hear, "It's all about believing. If you believe hard enough and you believe strongly enough, you can make it happen." Our prayers shouldn't be blind belief, because maybe what we're bringing in our expectations to prayer are not biblical. God is not our genie in a bottle to rub and grant us three wishes.

Our prayers have to be informed by the Word of God, by His truth. Who is God? He's not just a God we get to make in whatever image we want to make Him. His character is defined and it's revealed for us in His Word, and that should inform how we approach Him in prayer.

I'm sorry I have a lot of Timothy Keller for you this morning. But he says, "If the goal of prayer is a real personal connection with God, then it is only by immersion in the language of the Bible that we will learn to pray, perhaps just as slowly as a child learns to speak.

In the Bible, God's living Word, we can hear God speaking to us and we respond in prayer. Prayer becomes answering God, a full conversation, the clearer our understanding of who God is, the better our prayers. Prayer as a spiritual gift is a genuine personal conversation in reply to God's specific verbal revelation." What does that mean?

Well, there's no such thing as a one-sided conversation, is there? So if our prayer is a conversation with God, it can't just be us talking to God. We need to also be hearing God. And how do we hear Him? We have a nice thick book here that is full of the words of God and how He has revealed Himself to us.

That is how we hear God. We hear God by reading His Word. And so in essence, as we come to prayer, we read His Word, we pray, we read His Word, we pray, and God speaks to us through His living and active Word. And there's a conversation that's going on.

God reveals something about Himself or about ourselves, our sin, or our relationship with Him, and we respond. As we read about, "Let us come boldly to the throne of grace," there should be a response in our hearts to that. That's prayer. "God, thank You. Thank You that You sent Your Son to die on the cross so that I can come into the throne room of Almighty Creator, the One who created the entire universe, that we can't even fathom, in the depths of space, in the intricate design of nature here on earth, that You would open Your throne room to me, and not just as a humble servant that can timidly come into the king's throne room." He says, "We come boldly.

We come as His children. We come running to Him as our Father. God, thank You for the access You've given me. And Lord, there's a situation in my life. Could You help me? I need You. I don't know what to do in this situation. Or maybe there's nothing I can do, but God, I know You can.

You are Almighty God. You are powerful and able to accomplish all of Your purposes. Lord, could You please help me in this situation? And Father, regardless of how You choose to answer my prayer, could You help me to trust in Your goodness? Could You help me to trust that You know what is best?" Our prayer should be responses to what God reveals in His Word.

It's a two-sided conversation. And we saw that, didn't we, in those psalms that we looked at, where David pours out his heart to God. How does he get from frustration and anger to praise? It's because God spoke back to him. He remembered what God had revealed. He remembered the faithfulness of God in his life and how God had dealt abundantly with him.

And that caused him to praise. In the New Testament, we also have some examples of prayer. And even outside of the psalms, there's a lot of prayers in the Old Testament that you can look at. But in the New Testament, we have the disciples that come to Jesus and they say, "How do we pray?" John taught his disciples how to pray.

How are we supposed to pray? And Jesus begins in Matthew 6, verse 7, by saying, "And when you pray, don't use vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think they will be heard for their many words." How often is that true of us? I think if we just prayed long enough, it doesn't really matter what I say.

I can say the same thing over and over again. Can you imagine talking to someone and they tell you the same thing over and over and over again? It's a little tedious. We shouldn't use vain repetition in our prayers to God. It's a conversation. And so Jesus gives--and you can look at that in Matthew 6 or Luke 11-- He gives them an outline of when you come to pray, this is what you pray about.

You recognize who you're praying to. That goes to what we talked about last night, doesn't it? Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Who are you praying to? Remember who your God is as you come to Him in prayer. And then bring your petitions to Him, whether it's physical need, whether it's spiritual need as you're going through temptation.

Whatever it is, bring it to the Lord, recognizing who He is and that maybe He's not going to answer it the way you want, but He is going to answer it according to His love for you and His power. There's a book, and I don't usually come up and recommend books, but it's a pretty small little book by Donald Whitney, and it's called "Praying the Bible." And he talks about--and I'll actually just read because he says it better than I would-- about how our prayer life can become kind of that vain repetition where we kind of start saying the same things about the same things all the time.

I think it's kind of boring, doesn't it? And yet here we are talking to a mighty God who is active and working in our lives. How can we get bored talking to Him? This is what Donald says. "We've recognized the almost universal tendency to pray the same old things about the same old things, and that such prayer is boring.

When we have to compel ourselves to pray, our prayers are joyless, our minds wander, and a very few minutes in prayer seems like hours. As a result, we feel like spiritual failures, certainly that we are second-rate Christians. Many have endured the guilt of an incurably wandering mind and feelings of boredom in prayer for decades.

There is a simple, permanent, biblical solution to a problem that's plagued you for most of your life. To pray the Bible, you simply go through the passage line by line, talking to God about whatever comes to mind as you read the text. See how easy that is? Anyone can do it.

You can be talking to the most interesting person in the universe about the most important things in your life and be bored to death. Is that because you don't love God? No. Is it because you don't love what you're praying about? No. It's because you have essentially the same conversation about those things every day.

We need to be faithful to come to the Lord in prayer, because we don't want to have the same conversation about the same things every single day. And whether you read his book or just take that idea-- and again, the Psalms are sometimes the easiest to pray through. And as we close, I will pray through a portion of Psalm 23 as an illustration, but I would really encourage you to try this.

Whether you open to Psalms, whether you go to the New Testament and you look at the Lord's Prayer, pray through Scripture. Because as we talked about, our prayers need to be informed by the truth of God's Word, don't they? And so if we are praying through Scripture, our prayers will stay grounded in the reality of who God is and who we are in response.

So prayer is not a way to earn favor with God. And while it is an opportunity for us to bring our petitions to God, that is not its primary function. It is our opportunity to spend time with God. The God who paid the ultimate price for us to have fellowship with Him again, after we were the ones that broke it.

And our prayers need to be based on the truth of God's Word. It can't just be what we want to think about God. It needs to be based on who He truly is. So if you want to turn to Psalm 23, you're welcome to do so. But I'm going to go ahead and close us in prayer.

Father, we come to you and thank you that you are our shepherd. And Father, we are such dumb sheep sometimes. I thank you that in the face of our failures, in the face of our rebellion, in our divided hearts, Lord, you continue to be our faithful shepherd. That you don't just bless us because we've somehow earned it, but you bless us because you are our good shepherd.

Father, thank you for your faithfulness. And Lord, even though sometimes there are things that I think I need, you have never left us in want. You provide for every single need that we have. Lord, thank you for that. You tell us that we don't have to worry about a single hair on our head because every single aspect of our lives, you see it.

And as our Father, you provide for every single thing we need. Thank you for that, Lord. Thank you for your faithful provision. And Lord, in the midst of conflicts on every side, whether it's at work, with our families, with our children, our spouses, where we can rest in your goodness, Father, just as that shepherd protects his sheep and brings them to a place of refuge and rest, we can depend upon you for that.

And Lord, may we find that green pasture to be our relationship with you, Father. As we come to you in prayer, may we find joy in your presence, not just in the blessings that you so abundantly pour out upon us, but that we would find joy in our relationship with you.

Father, open our eyes to the richness that you have given us in your presence, God. Father, I ask as we go from here to small group time, to activity time, may it be with that awareness that you are our Father and you are our friend, and we can share our lives with you.

Not coming to you just when we need your help, when we need your provision, but also just to enjoy time in your presence. As faithful as you are as our shepherd, Father, I feel like such a faithless, rebellious sheep. So often I let wants that are not needful to come between me and the things that are needful.

And the one thing that is most needful is you. May our lives just be permeated with you, God. As we focus upon you, as we magnify you in our vision, may our circumstances, our pain, our desires, may those all be put in a proper perspective as we seek your face.

Father, we thank you for this time to come apart, to sit at your feet. I ask that you would just abundantly bless the time that these ladies have today. Minister to them. Open their eyes to your glory, God. We thank you and we come to you through the work of Jesus Christ that allows us to come boldly into your throne room, that we can find help when we need it.

We pray these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.