Let God Be God

Let God Be God

The LORD your God is with you, He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing. — Zephaniah 3:17

God aims to exalt Himself by working for those who wait for Him.

Prayer is the essential activity of waiting for God — acknowledging our helplessness and His power, calling upon Him for help, seeking His counsel.

Since His purpose in the world is to be exalted for His mercy, it is evident why prayer is so often commanded by God. Prayer is the antidote for the disease of self-confidence, which opposes God’s goal of getting glory by working for those who wait for Him….

God is not looking for people to work for Him, so much as He is looking for people who will let Him work for them…. The gospel commands us to give up and hang out a help-wanted sign (this is the basic meaning of prayer). Then the gospel promises that God will work for us if we do. He will not surrender the glory of being the Giver.

— John Piper, from Desiring God

Father God, thank You for Your heart to show yourself strong on behalf of those who wait for You. Today, Lord, I put out a “help-wanted sign” and choose to wait on You. Amen.

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Hoping and Praying

Prepare your minds for action. — 1 Peter 1:13

It’s a risky thing to pray and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing is not to pray but to go directly to God. There is no such thing as a kind of prayer in which you do absolutely nothing. If you are doing nothing you are not praying.

Prayer is the movement of trust, of gratitude, of adoration, or of sorrow, that places us before God, seeing both Him and ourselves in the light of His infinite truth, and moves us to ask Him for the mercy, the spiritual strength, the material help that we all need.

The man [or woman] whose prayer is so pure that he never asks God for anything does not know who God is, and does not know who he is himself: for he does not know his own need of God.

All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death.

It is, therefore, a deep and vital contact with Him whom we know not only as Lord but as Father. It is when we pray truly that we really are.

— Thomas Merton

Precious Lord, I bring to You all that I am and all that I have. I am Yours alone. Teach me to rely completely on You. Amen.

Excerpted with permission from Daybook of Prayer, copyright Thomas Nelson.

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Your Turn

“Help Wanted” is the attitude of heart of prayer. Today, let’s pray that the Lord would spark a fire in our hearts for prayer that we would go directly to Him with every issue in our lives and beyond. Come share your thoughts with us on our blog. We want to hear from you! ~ Devotionals Daily