What's the Focus of Your Prayers?

“Your kingdom come, your will be done, right here, right now in my life as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10)

Prayer calls me to abandon the present as my only lens on life and commit to look at life from the perspective of reality.

What is the most needed, yet the most dangerous, prayer you could ever pray? It is the one prayer that takes you beyond the small-picture hopes and dreams that kidnap so much of your prayer. It is all right to pray about your job, marriage, family, finances, house, children, retirement, vacation, investments, church, health, government, and the weather, but it is not enough. This kind of prayer follows the “right now-me” model of prayer. It is about life right here, right now and about what I have come to think that I need right here, right now. Yes, God cares about your present life. He gives you grace for this moment. Right now He is with, for, and in you. But He calls you to view yourself and your life from a perspective that goes far beyond this mo­ment and extends far beyond your ability to diagnose what you truly need.

The one prayer Christ calls us all to pray requires us to let go of our momentary agendas and take up His eternal one. It requires us to surrender our distorted sense of need to His perfect sense of what is best. It is the “forever-you” model of prayer. It requires you to take the long view—to let go of your hold on your life and surrender to the kingship of another. It is captured by a few dangerous words.

Why “danger­ous”? Because they have the power to turn your life upside down, to make you a very different you than you have been. Here is what we have been called to pray: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, right here, right now in my life as it is in heaven” (see Mt. 6:10). It is only in the context of the surrender of these words that Jesus welcomes you to pray about your right-here, right-now needs.

Here is grace. I don't have to work to be a king and I don’t have to carry the burdens of a king because I have been gifted with a King. In His kingdom, I am blessed with every good thing I will ever need, and in my welcome to His kingdom, I am included in something that will never, ever end. So pray that prayer because its dangerous grace is really what you (and I) need. Don’t hesitate. Do it now. Why live for what will pass away? Why give your searching heart to what can never satisfy? Why tell yourself that you know what you need, when the One who created you knows better and has promised to deliver?

P.D.T.