Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Prayer | Habits

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in 2023. Get your FREE reading plan here. Do you really understand how prayer works? When are you most likely to pray? If you pray the right way, will God give you want you want? In today's episode, Jensen looks at Jesus's example of prayer and shares four helpful tips to create a habit of prayer. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jensen Holt McNair. Dear Lord, please help me to fall asleep and stay asleep for the rest of the night and to wake up in the morning. Amen. That is the one prayer and maybe the only prayer I prayed for the majority of my childhood before I went to bed every single night. I was afraid of the dark and I was afraid of dying. And so I wanted to fall asleep fast, stay asleep all night, and definitely wake up not dead in the morning. Those were my priorities. And that is what I prayed for years.

As I grew up, my prayers evolved to include other worries and fears. But looking back, I see a distinct pattern in my life that revealed a deep misunderstanding of what prayer really was. I always thought prayer was about getting something from God. And on some level, I think I thought if you prayed the right way, then you were more likely to get what you wanted. But I ended up praying when I needed something and only when I needed something. This led to a prayer-dependent life when things were really hard and a prayer-barren life the rest of the time.

And to be honest, that pattern still forges its way into my life today. See, prayer has always seemed mysterious or uncomfortable to me in any other form than just asking for something. And it hasn't come easy to me to slowly break down the belief that that is the only way that I can pray. But what if the point of prayer was far different? What if instead of looking at prayer as a list we present before God to get what we think we need, we saw it as a life-changing habit of spending time connecting with God? Now making prayer happen in my life hasn't come easy, and I'm not there yet. To be honest, I'm learning a whole lot from people much smarter than me by reading books and listening to podcasts

on the subject. But for today, I want to go back to Scripture, to the place in the Bible where Jesus gives us an instructions manual on how to pray. And I just want to learn from his example of what it can look like to pray to God habitually and not just when I feel like I need help. diving in Matthew 6 verse 5 And when you pray you must not be like the hypocrites For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues And at the street corners That they may be seen by others

Truly I say to you They have received their reward But when you pray Go into your room and shut the door And pray to your father who is in secret And your father who sees in secret Will reward you First Jesus teaches a

to pray in silence and solitude. I am the queen of offering up a prayer here and there throughout my day, but the action of setting aside time to sit alone, in silence, with the sole goal of connecting and praying to my father, always radically changes the way I pray. The goal is not to look great to others or to show off our prayer skills, but to connect with our father in private. This doesn't mean that corporate prayer is bad, it's good. It's just to critique on the heart behind prayer. Jesus wants us to examine why we are praying, and remember the centrality of creating a time and space to connect with God. Verse 7, and when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need

before you ask him. So second, on a similar note, Jesus reminds us that our prayers are not to be a show for God. It's not about saying the right thing eloquently or filling time, but about again, genuinely connecting with God. Sometimes when I have something to bring before God in prayer, I talk a lot. But other times there's silence,

sitting alone, thinking about the goodness of God, listening, waiting, being still, with him. And that can feel so weird. But I also know that our prayers are about genuine connection with the Lord. And sometimes I'm too sad or frustrated to say the right thing. And I just need to sit with him. And that's okay. Next, Jesus gives us a clear example of what a prayer like this could look like. Verse 9. Pray then like this. Our Father in heaven. hallowed be your name, your kingdom come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors,

and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. The first thing I want to note is that Jesus gives us an example of asking God for things. He asks for provision, for forgiveness, and for protection from evil. Bringing our petitions to God is a good thing, something that we can and should do. And that's great news. Our prayers have power to change things because we pray to a God who listens and who is Lord over all of creation. So of course we should bring our petitions before him, believing that he is good and he is working and able to provide, forgive, and protect us. But before he has asks of anything else, we also see Jesus pray in verse 10 that God's kingdom would come and that

his will would be done. Now, this part of prayer has been really incredibly life-changing for me, and often the time in my prayer where I sit before God in silence. I want to start out just bringing my petitions to God and telling him what he needs to do, but Jesus shows us a different way. Before we ask of God, we lay down our control, our perception of what is good and right and wrong. We surrender our lives, our world, our hopes, our dreams, our petitions to the will of God. We ask for His kingdom values to reign in our lives and his plans to come so that we can live within the goodness of His will. Sometimes this is followed by a simple prayer to ask God to help my heart to even want those things, and then a time to sit and remember the goodness of his kingdom and the wisdom of his will.

Taking the time to do this often shapes the way I even ask for provision, forgiveness, and protection. And it allows my hands to be open in asking, rather than grasping tightly to what I believe needs. to happen. And even before we do that, Jesus instructs us to begin our prayers by orienting our hearts and reminding our minds who it is that we are even praying to, our Heavenly Father. We are both reminded of the intimacy that we can have with God as our Father, who cares for us and delights in us, but also as his status as sovereign king over all creation. We are in Him. We are in invited to see God as intimately as Jesus does, as Father, and still to know that his name is hallowed, set apart and holy. We start out our prayer praising the wonder of who this God is that we

are praying to. Yahweh, the one who came to dwell intimately with his people, and the one who is perfectly holy and worthy of praise. When we come before the Lord in prayer daily, not to get something out of him, but to spend time with him, I think we'll start to see the fruitfulness of this spiritual discipline. It's easy to walk away from a prayer where I demand something of God, still frustrated, anxious, and uneasy. But when we take the time to daily remember who our God is, to reorient our desires and our hearts to match his desires, to pray that his kingdom and will would be done, and to humbly present our needs before him, I think we will start to see a change in our prayer life. When we take the time to genuinely connect to our God,

to bring our thoughts and minds and hearts more in tune with His kingdom, we may find that our desires, our wants and hopes, begin to slowly look more and more like His kingdom values as well. And so, as we enter into the new year next week, it is my hope that our prayer lives would be radically changed as we spend time with our king in solitude, reflecting on who he is, and reorienting our hearts to desire his kingdom above all else. 2020 is coming to a close, and we are so excited to tell you that in January, we are going to start going through the New Testament in a year. And so if you're excited about that, we hope that you will join us and listen along and maybe even invite a friend to join you as you listen. See you then.