How To Pray
Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.
Matthew 7:7 RSV
Even a child can understand these instructions. Prayer is for God’s children. Jesus said, “When ye pray, say, Our Father. . . .”
There were children in our neighborhood for whom we provided all clothing, food, and the necessities of life. They asked freely of us, and their requests were usually granted. Why did we do this, and why did they respond this way? They were our children! By virtue of their relationship to us, we had a particular responsibility to them.
God has a particular responsibility to His children; and unless we have been born into the family of God through the new birth, we have no right to ask favors of God. The Bible says, “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name” (John 1:12).
I have had new Christians say to me,” I don’t know how to pray. I don’t have the right words.”
When our children were just learning to talk and had difficulty finding the right words, they still managed to make themselves understood to my wife and me, and the mistakes they made only endeared them to us. In fact, I am sure I treasure their early attempts at conversation more than the words of most adults speaking without hesitation and without error.
Oh, my anxious friend whose prayers have not been answered, God invites you to the intimacy of spiritual sonship. “That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15).
Our Father and our God, hear my prayer, even though my words get in the way. You know my heart, and You know my needs without my saying them, but here are the things that are troubling me right now. . . . Help me to hear Your answers, Lord, through Your Word and through Your Spirit. Amen.
Billy Graham, Unto the Hills: A Daily Devotional (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010).