E. M. Bounds once remarked: “Prayer honors God, acknowledges His being, exalts His power, adores His providence, secures His aid.”1 While securing God’s aid is important when we pray, I believe, that prayer is so much more than that. To me the primary purpose of prayer can be summed up well by the following quote from author Warren Wiersbe: “The immediate purpose of prayer is the accomplishing of God’s will on earth; the ultimate purpose of prayer is the eternal glory of God.”2
And while it is definitely not wrong to pray for our needs and the needs of others, too often this becomes our primary focus in prayer. In fact, evangelist Leonard Ravenhill stated this well when he said: “Most Christian pray to be blessed. Few pray to be broken.”3 Have you ever prayed to be broken? May I submit to you that this is one prayer that God will always answer since when we are broken God can then use us mightily to advance His kingdom, do His will, and glorify His name. The fact of the matter is that when we are broken we can then be filled with the Spirit of God and when this happens our prayer lives will become transformed and God’s eternal glory will be the centerpiece of our cries to the Lord.
Another blessing that happens when a Christian prays to be broken is that he becomes a vessel that God can mold more into the image of Christ and this should be the cry of every Christian. Imagine the more we become Christlike the more we will pray like Christ. And the exciting thing about this is that when we become broken we become in reality unbreakable!
Broken Christians choose to let Christ run their lives and when this happens our prayers will conform more to the pattern that we see in the Lord’s Prayer in (Matthew 6). Thus, our priority will be to hallow God’s name, pray for the advancement of His kingdom, and to see that His will be carried out. Only after this should we pray for our own needs and the needs of others. My friends broken Christians are the only ones that can break through the domains of darkness in our world and see victory after victory become the norms in our prayer life. May I challenge you to pray to become a broken vessel and pray along with Andrew Murray who once said: “O, let the place of secret prayer become to me the most beloved spot on earth.”4
1 850 Quotes About Prayer | ChristianQuotes.info
2 Praying with Purpose (mywatermark.org)
3 There is Great Power in Brokenness » The Faithful Wanderer
“When we are broken God can then use us mightily to advance His kingdom, do His will, and glorify His name.”
Men throw broken things away, but God never uses anything until he first breaks it. Adrian Rogers SBC see meaning of kintsugi.