Every single one of us has some sort of personal needs. And God expects us to bring our needs to Him and to tell Him about them. In Matt. 7:7-11, Jesus tells us, "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!" And James 4:2 tells us, "You do not have, because you do not ask God."
Scripture makes it clear that God expects us to take our needs to Him and to ask Him for help with them. God commands us to ask, and He also encourages us to do so. In fact, the model seems to be that we need to ask in faith and then God responds to our needs. 1 John 5:15 puts it this way, "And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him."
Prayer Regarding Our Own Needs
The term "personal prayer" describes when we present our needs and concerns to God. Personal prayer is supposed to be a part of our regular prayer life. This includes asking God to help you with a problem or need, such as if finances are tight or a problem at work or if you need some sort of physical healing or emotional strength. Or it can be seeking Him for wisdom or guidance. Or when something really troubles you, you might discuss it with God and work through it with Him. Or perhaps you might seek Him to give you a specific spiritual gift or anointing. These are all examples of personal prayers, where we talk to God about our needs and desires, and ask Him to meet us in them. And God loves to meet us in our place of need to make our faith and confidence in Him grow.
Phil. 4:19 says, "And my God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus." That means that God is predisposed to give us what we need when we ask Him for it. He may not always do it in the way we expect or in the time frame we expect, but He will always take good care of us. This goes for the big things and the little things. Let me share examples of both.
I live in a big city and parking is always a problem. It seems that there are more cars than places to park them. I commute in on public transportation to San Francisco. But even the parking spaces at the BART (rapid transit system) station are limited. Usually you have to get there pretty early to get a space. Yesterday, God asked me to work on a teaching before I left for work. I was hesitant to do that because I knew there wouldn't be any parking spaces if I didn't get there early. I felt like He said He knew I would need a spot and He would take care of it. I went ahead and did what God requested, and it took several hours. When I got to the station, many cars were driving around looking for spaces and even the "late lot," where people aren't allowed to park until after 10 a.m. was full. I prayed, "God, where is that spot you promised me? Please give it to me." I drove right up to the section of the lot nearest the entrance, which is usually the first section to fill up. I turned down an aisle and prayed, "OK God, you know I need a parking spot, please give me one." Half way up that aisle was an empty spot. I was amazed because it was one of the best (most convenient) spaces in the parking lot. I got out of my car praising God and thanking Him. Some of the other drivers looking for spots looked at me in utter amazement, as if to ask, "How on earth did you find a parking spot?"
Some of you may say that's neat, but it's not really a very important thing. That's true, it was a small thing. God wants to meet our needs even in the small things. He loves us and He wants to take care of us. And He knows that when He meets us in the small things, it builds our faith for trusting Him in bigger things.
God also wants to meet our needs in the "really big things." Let me share a friend's story with you. Her name is Elvi and she is on staff with me at the GodSpeak ministry. Elvi's story illustrates how sometimes God will meet our needs in a totally different way than we expect Him to.
Elvi was recently married. God spoke to her that He had a call on her life and wanted her to train for the ministry and become licensed as a minister. She shared what she heard with her husband. After praying about it, he agreed that she had heard from God. So, they acted on it. She applied to and got accepted in a two-year school of ministry and they relocated across country to the city where the school was. They put their house up for sale (the one where they used to live), planning to use the money from the sale of their home for tuition (it was an expensive program). A few months went by and the house didn't sell and they couldn't find a renter for it either. They were unable to make the payments for the unoccupied house, and the bank repossessed it. That meant Elvi didn't have the money for tuition. The school of ministry told Elvi they couldn't grant her a loan or extension, and since she didn't have the tuition, she wouldn't be allowed to attend. From a human perspective, it looked like God hadn't come through for Elvi. She lost her property and moved across country (away from home and friends) to obey God, and then it seemed like He wasn't taking care of her needs.
I wasn't aware of all of Elvi's story. But God had begun speaking to me to train Elvi and help her get credentials through the same organization where I was credentialed. When God first started speaking to me about this, I was sure I "heard wrong" because I knew she was enrolled in the school of ministry. But God was very persistent. So I talked to the GodSpeak board and they all agreed God wanted us to train Elvi for ministry. God helped us come up with a fairly comprehensive training program as well as having her intern with the ministry to get practical ministry experience. We had the entire plan in place before we called Elvi to see if she was interested. It's true that God didn't come in at the 11th hour to keep Elvi from losing her property. But He did come through another way, by putting something in place (with no tuition fee) that was similar to the training she was going to use the house sale money for. God took care of Elvi, though not in the way she originally expected.
Petition Prayer
We have different types of needs at different times. And there are different ways of praying about them. The most obvious is when we need a specific thing. So we tell God about the situation and we tell Him what we would like Him to do for us in it. We present our requests and our desires to God. This is called "petition prayer." The neat thing about petition prayer is that when we pray "rightly," we can have confidence that God will answer our prayers. 1 John 5:15 says, "And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him."
That leads us to the question, what is praying rightly? We know it is important to pray with right motives, because James 4:2-3 says, "You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures." We need to be praying from a kingdom perspective, aware of God's will and desires in the situation. We need to be praying out of a place of deep intimate relationship with Him.
We also need to understand the difference between wants and needs. God does promise to supply all of our needs (Phil. 4:19). But He doesn't promise to give us all of our "wants." There are times when He says no. Those of you who are parents can understand the principle. When your children watch television, they want everything that each commercial advertises. They sincerely want it and feel they need it, even though they don't. And God, as a loving parent, won't always give us everything we want. In fact, some of what we want may be bad for us (like a child wanting to eat only candy and no nutritious food).
Some people misinterpret Psalm 37:4 to believe God will give them anything they want. The verse says, "Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart." They think that verse promises them that if they delight in God, they can have anything they want and God is obligated to give it to them. Someone wants to be married, so they believe this verse promised them a spouse. Someone wants a new car, so they believe God is obligated to give them one. Someone wants a trip to Europe even though they have no money, so they think God is going to cause them to win a contest or win the lottery. But that isn't what Psalm 37:4 promises.
The verse talks about delighting ourselves in God, of looking to Him as our source of joy and pleasure, of wanting Him more than we want anything else. God responds to that type of hunger for Him by revealing Himself to us. That verse says that if we earnestly desire a closer, deeper and more intimate relationship with God, then He will give Himself to us and bring us into that type of relationship with Him.
God isn't Santa Claus. He hasn't obligated Himself to grant our every whim and desire. But He does happen to be a God who delights to give good gifts to His children. Jesus says so in Matt. 7:7-11. He happens to love doing nice things for His children, and He has a tendency to say "yes" when we ask Him for things. The difference is that we need to put our desire and focus on God, not on the thing. If we ask Him for something that we want because we think it will make us feel satisfied or happy, and we look to that thing to be what supplies our joy and happiness, God will probably say "no." He wants us to look to Him as our source of joy and fulfillment. So if we try to substitute something in God's place of giving happiness and meaning to our life, that is a form of idolatry. And God won't encourage us in that.
But if we look to God as our source and are in a solid and meaningful relationship with Him, then He likes to do nice things for us. He likes to give us things that we desire, things that cause us joy. I can't tell you how many times I've asked God for something and He has done it for me. I saw a commercial for a play on TV once and wanted to go to it, but it was already sold out. So I prayed, and someone (totally out of the blue) offered me very good seats to this play as a gift. It seems that something came up and they couldn't go, and they "felt impressed" I should have them. I have been given "free" tickets to professional football games, movies, theaters and even airplane tickets because I asked God and He said yes. (There are also times I've asked God for something and He said, "No.")
God does like to give us good gifts when we look to Him as our Friend, Lord, Master and Loving Father and we delight ourselves in Him. But He doesn't enjoy it when we look to Him only as a source of getting the things we want. And if we come to Him in that manner, we're just trying to "use" Him. In that case, He'll frequently say "No" to our request for things we want but don't really need. His hope and desire is that we will want Him more than we want the things He can give us.
Lesson 8 looked at taking our personal needs to God in prayer. We learned that He promises to take care of our needs, but He likes to be asked to do so. We also saw that God is a loving Father Who delights to give good gifts to His children, so He will often (but not always) give us the things we desire as well. We learned that it is OK to bring our wants and needs to God and ask Him to meet us in them.
But there are other dimensions to personal prayer as well.
Seeking Wisdom/Guidance
The Bible gives us a lot of wonderful insights into how we should live our lives and how God desires us to behave. It makes it real clear that God wants us to walk in honesty and integrity. So if someone comes to us with a dishonest "get-rich-quick" scheme, we don't have to pray for divine guidance about whether to participate in that. The Bible already makes it clear that God doesn't want us involved in unrighteous schemes.
But there are many situations we can get in that the Bible doesn't clearly deal with. For instance, a high school student may want to know which colleges s/he should apply to. A businessman may have two job offers and wants to know which job God wants him to take. Or perhaps an important relationship in your life is becoming problematic, and you need wisdom from God about what to do in that relationship.
Fortunately, God loves to give us His wisdom and guidance in any situation we bring to Him and ask Him about. James 1:5 encourages us to ask God anytime we need His advice. It says, "If you need wisdom -- if you want to know what God wants you to do -- ask Him, and He will gladly tell you. He will not resent your asking" (NLT).
God wants us to get to the place where we can go to Him for anything, big or small. Most of us find it hard to trust God in the "big stuff" if we haven't already seen His faithfulness in smaller things. God is quite happy to help us in the little things as well as the big ones. He loves to build our faith that way. 1 Cor. 2:5 explains it this way, "... so that you might trust the power of God rather than human wisdom." God wants us to get in the habit of trusting Him for His guidance in all things. He wants you to have "a complete understanding of what He wants to do in your lives, and to make you wise with spiritual wisdom" (Col. 1:9).
If you have a difficult problem that leaves you upset and worried or frustrated, try talking to God about it. You might be able to work through the problem with Him.
I do this a lot, and He always seems to give me insights to put things into perspective and come up with a strategy. I happen to be a fast typist and I'm very comfortable on computers. So I keep a directory on my computer called "dhs" for "Dear Holy Spirit." When I'm frustrated or confused or worried about something, I go to God for advice. The way I do it is to sit down and begin typing in a file in that directory as if I were writing a letter (or an email) to God, describing the problem and telling Him how I feel about it. As I do this, God usually speaks to me. He brings clarity, insight to the situation. He also brings along godly principles and shows me how to apply them to that situation. I literally work through the problem with God. On a really big issue, I may end up writing more than one "dhs" letter to God as I explore different issues all related to the same problem. God loves to give us His insights, wisdom and advice as we invite Him into our puzzling or troubling situations.
Another aspect of divine wisdom and guidance is to invite God to actively be involved in your day, leading and guiding, etc. I call that asking God to orchestrate our day. In the morning, I make a fresh commitment to His lordship in my life and I ask Him to be in control of what happens. I invite Him to lead and guide and I give Him permission to break into my routine with His presence or direction any time He feels like it. And when He does that, I'm committed to obey Him.
Sometimes it's simple little things, like when I wanted to read a textbook for a ministry class on BART. I had a half-hour train ride and I intended to use it productively to study. But God sat me next to a woman whose husband was in the hospital. She made a brief call to her daughter's answering machine telling her that, "It doesn't look good. They did an angiogram last night. I'm on my way to the hospital now." I wanted to ignore her problem and study, but God told me to minister to her.
So I began to talk to her. Pretty soon she had broken down and tearfully shared her story. They were from Texas. Her husband had collapsed on a business trip and had been in a coma for a month. She had left her job and flew out here and was staying in "corporate housing" from her husband's company and spending all day at the hospital by her husband's side in hopes he might wake up. She was unable to sleep or eat much because of the stress of the situation. So I was able to pray with her for her husband and to minister to her for the half-hour train ride. My agenda was to study for my class. But God's agenda was to comfort His daughter and He orchestrated my day to seat me next to her on BART on my way to work.
Sometimes God breaks into our day in really big ways. I got an email from someone shortly after the September 11 terrorist attack. I'm not sure if this is a true story, but I think it might be. A woman was supposed to be on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania when terrorists tried to hijack it. She was on a business trip and wanted to get back home to be with her family. But God had broken into her day during the trip and instructed her to call her estranged sister to restore the relationship. She didn't want to do that, but she obeyed God. The sister wanted to get together face to face so she extended her trip a few days and rescheduled her flight home. If she hadn't rescheduled, she would have been killed on the fight home. God broke into her day in a really big way and saved her life when He asked her to call her estranged sister.
Seeking A Heart After God
King David was known as a man after God's heart. God Himself said that about David: "I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after My own heart, who will do all My will" (Acts 13:22). How do you think David got to be that way? I believe it had something to do with his prayer life. He prayed some very powerful prayers inviting God to transform his heart and thinking. Possibly his most well-known prayer is recorded in Psalms 51:10-12. "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" (NKJ).
One day when I was doing prayerful study, God began to speak to me about that passage. I began to see that I needed to have my heart changed as well, that I wasn't able to change myself, that I needed Him to transform me. So I came up with my own version of David's prayer that I prayed daily for several years. It went like this: "Lord, please change my heart to line up with Your heart. Change my thinking to line up with Your thinking. Change my desires, so that I begin to like what You like and to distain what You distain. Change my motives to line up with Your motives."
I didn't see any instant changes, but over time, I did begin to notice that the things I wanted to do lined up more closely with God's will and that I had much less desire toward things that didn't further God's kingdom. I can't put my finger on a specific incident or date and say that I was changed from that time. It was a slow and gradual change over time. In fact, I'm probably still in the process of that transformation. But one day I did notice how much I had changed without even trying to. I had been inviting God to change my desires and heart motivations and He did.
He wants to do that for each of His children. He delights in transforming us and it gives Him great pleasure when we ask Him to change our hearts to better line up with His. A good place to start praying into this is to invite Him to have His complete restoration work in your own life. Tell Him that you will cooperate with Him as He does this, that you desire to be transformed to line up with His plans and purposes for you. Invite Him to examine your own heart, as per Psalms 139:23-24. Invite Him to transform your heart and make it pure before Him, as per Psalms 51:10-12.
You need to understand that if you pray along this line, God is going to answer your prayer, and a part of that answer will probably involve His refiner's fire. He will sometimes throw us into the "fire" of difficult circumstances so our impurities, fears and doubts rise up to the surface that He might get rid of them. God will usually transform us through a process rather than instantly. But we each need to be personally transformed if the church is to be transformed, because we (collectively) make up the Body of Christ; we are the church! So our prayer strategy goes something like this:
Change, restore and renew Your church; I'm part of it, so start with me. I'm willing to submit to You as You work in me. I pray that You will do a similar work in each of us, and that we will each have a heart to submit to You as You do it.
Seeking A Gifting/Anointing
Sometimes we desire a particular gifting or anointing, such as praying for the sick and seeing them healed or speaking clear and accurate prophetic words, etc. We find that it is OK to ask God to give us the giftings and anointings we desire. 1 Cor. 14:12-13 make it clear that we have permission to ask for spiritual gifts because Paul tells that those who have the gift of tongues should also ask God for the gift of interpretation. And Matt. 7:11 says, "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!" So it stands to reason that if you want a certain spiritual gift, ask God for it.
I have found this works over and over in my own life. In fact, the way I got the gift of prophecy was asking God for it. It was my birthday and God asked me what I wanted for my birthday. So I told Him I wanted the gift of prophecy. (I was a bit afraid that He might think I was being greedy and asking for too much.) He told me "OK, I gave it to you." I didn't believe Him when He told me that. More precisely, I didn't believe it was really God's voice speaking to me. I thought maybe it was the desire of my own heart imitating God's voice. So God asked me what it would take to believe Him and I had no idea. Then He said, "What if I have a prophet from out of state call you to tell you that I gave you the gift of prophecy? Would that convince you?" I said yes, that would be pretty convincing. Later that evening the phone rang and it was a prophet from Alabama. He said God told him he had to call me that day, it couldn't be the day before or the day after. It had to be that day. He had a short word for me. The word was that God was giving me the gift of prophecy in response to my request for it.
You see, God really does release spiritual gifts when we ask Him for them. Later I began seeking God for a healing anointing, and He has given me opportunities to pray for many sick people and see them get healed. I've seen sight return to blind eyes. I've seen deaf ears open. I've seen people get out of wheelchairs and I've even seen cancer fall off of people. I don't know if I move in healing at the "gift level," but God has certainly given me an anointing to pray for the sick and see them recover. And I love it when God has me pray for someone and then heals them supernaturally.
If you desire a spiritual gift or anointing, ask God for it. He just might say yes to your request.
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