O Lord, Be Gracious to Us

 I am not sure how often you pray, and I don't know what you pray, as you talk with God. However, I want to say to all of us that it is very important for us to pray the right things in the right way. Yes, I know we can talk with God about anything, and we should talk with him about everything. What I mean is that we need to be sure we are showing Him our need for Him and our desire for His will to be done, not our will.

Isaiah gave us a very good start on praying that way in a one verse prayer. (Isaiah 33:2) He said, "O Lord, be gracious to us; we have waited for You. Be their arm every morning, our salvation also in time of trouble." See what I mean? It is a very compact prayer, but it covers a lot of what we need to pray, and it does it in the right way. Let's take it apart and see what we can learn from this prayer.

We need to pray from our heart, with sincere emotion, because we are addressing the Lord. That is what the "O" means. It is a heart cry. We need to cry out to the Lord, the One who is in charge of all things. We ask Him to be gracious to us. That means we recognize that we do not deserve much, if anything, but we desire for him to give us more than we deserve. God will hear and answer that kind of heart felt request.

Then, we pray for Him to be our "arm" every morning. We need Him to be our strength, not just give us strength. When we try to do things on our own, in our own strength, we always mess up. We need to look to the Lord to work in and through us every morning and all day long. Finally, we need to ask Him to be our salvation, our deliverer, in time of trouble. We will have troubles, but God can overcome them, if we are submitted to Him. I believe that is a pretty powerful prayer. What about you?

#NHBaptistdotorg

Tomorrow, I intend to read Isaiah 35-37.