Relating To God Through Prayer

Outpost Family,

Thank you for checking in with us for our next blog post. I hope this will be helpful in your installment of new spiritual practices.

Simply put, prayer is the practice of communication to God.

If we genuinely have a relationship rooted in love with God we should want an open and constant line of communication with Him. We intuitively get this concept when it comes to our spouses or children. There is probably never a moment when communication with your family ‘ceases.’

You talk with your family, not out of obligation, but out of your love for them. You desire to know how your kids are doing and what their day was like. You want to know what is on your spouses heart and how they are feeling in any given moment. Even when you don’t really feel like talking with those you love most, your duty to the relationship will outweigh your emotions.
There are several things that will keep us from praying to God. Perhaps we have unconfessed or hidden sin in our lives. It could be that we are angry or disappointed in God or confused by His lack of intervention. All of those things will likely cause you to want to pull away and break communication.

But…

We said this week that the two only ways to do prayer wrong are:

• To fail to pray. Just as it would be a serious problem in your marriage if you stopped all communication for days or weeks at a time, so it is with God. This shouldn’t press you towards a legalistic view that prayer is something you need to do in order to check the box. You don’t view it that way in your other relationships and we should take that stance when communicating with God.
• To hide your true self before God. Jesus tells us that: “He already knows what you need before you even come before Him…” so don’t try and dress your prayers up in pretense with fancy language or with a heart that is hiding its true emotions from the one who already sees and knows you.

We then looked at Jesus’ model prayer and how He invites us to approach God. I won’t rehash that all here but you can check the sermon out below in case you missed it.
I do, however, want to give you the acronym that can help you structure your prayers in line with Jesus’ teaching.

We showed you the A.C.T.S model of prayer this week.

A.C.T.S stands for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication.

Adoration – We should begin our prayers in recognition of the one we are praying to and why He is worthy of addressing our prayers to. Adoration is about recognizing and thanking God for who He is.
      For instance, God is all-knowing. Perhaps you are going through something in your life that you feel nobody understands. Beginning your prayer by recognizing that God absolutely knows and understands you and worshipping Him in light of that will not only change the way you pray but will often change your expectations of the outcomes.

Confession – If prayer is about living constantly and intentionally open before God then sin is the great barrier to that. Confession is about recognizing all of the ways you have missed God’s mark for goodness and righteousness (right relationship with Him and others) and confessing that before God in repentance.
If I know that I have obviously offended and messed up with my wife, it would be a mistake to enter back into conversation with her pretending that nothing was wrong. It would be disingenuous and hurtful. I want to seek forgiveness and reconciliation with her because I do not want to introduce distance between us into our relationship.

Thanksgiving – For some this does not seem very different from the first step of adoration, but if adoration is thanking God for who He is, then thanksgiving is about thanking God for what He has specifically done. It is only from a heart of thankfulness that we are truly poised to make our petitions known before God. Otherwise, we can easily become guilty of using God for our own self-serving agendas…by the way, those prayers rarely, if ever, get answered.

Supplication – This is just a fancy word for request (we use it because it helps complete the A.C.T.S acronym). This request can be anything…but here is the important thing: Supplication must come last and the first three parts of prayer must be accomplished in sincerity before making our requests.

      When we have recognized who we are talking to and aligned our heart and agenda under God’s, only then will we ask for those things which He is already most eager to answer.
      Sin obstructs our view of God and the world around us, and until it is confessed before God, our prayers will always be hindered (See James 5:16).
      Only a heart that has found satisfaction in God and lives in thankfulness for all He has already done can truly pray “not my will but thy will be done.”

Once you have sincerely been through this process, you can truly expect to take hold of Jesus’ promise from John 16:

"...Truly I tell you, anything you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. Until now you have asked for nothing in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete."

Jesus wants to answer our prayers…He has promised that God will answer. Praying “in Jesus’ name” is the only prerequisite in this passage. And praying genuinely through the A.C.T.S model ensures that we will do just that.

And so, prayer above all else, is a heart-realignment tool that places our desires and will under God’s and ask’s that His will be done. It is a tool that helps us delight in God’s will.
And so, will you take the challenge of growing your prayer life with just one small step?

Don’t overdo it. Don’t commit to praying 30 minutes a day when you don’t even pray every day during the week right now. Don’t start a prayer journal if you can’t even remember the last time you did pray.

Start small.

Start with a manageable next step of faith and watch it grow into something amazing over time.

I pray this has been helpful and if you have any questions or would like to discuss this material any further, please don’t hesitate to reach out!


In Christ,
The Outpost Church