The next time you pray to the Lord may I ask you to examine your motives. While we can come to the Lord in prayer with various motives I believe that our highest motive, the motive that most pleases God and causes Him to answer our prayers is when our greatest desire is to glorify His name.
Yes, it is OK to pray for our needs and the needs of others, but our underlying motive should not just be that needs are met but that by meeting these needs God is glorified and gets all the credit. My greatest desire when I pray is that God answers my prayers and through these answers His greatness is manifested to the whole world and thus is glorified.
And a key way we can bring God glory with our prayers is to align ourselves with God’s will. Not only will we get answers to our prayers when our wills align with God’s will, but in the process we can be the instruments that God uses to bring glory to His name. And that will always bring great joy to our hearts when we realize that the Creator of the universe is allowing us the awesome privilege of playing a key role in bringing glory to His name.
I think that Pastor Michael Youssef shares a keen insight on our need to align our wills with the Lord’s will when we pray:
“Jesus’ people need to humble themselves and pray, aligning their will with the will of God. We must ask, ‘God, what is Your will so I can pray Your will and have my will aligned with Yours?’ That’s the right way to pray. We will only see the fruit of answering His call when our will is aligned with His. The Bible gives us countless examples of how aligning our will with His in prayer yields great intercessory results.
“When Moses aligned his will with God’s will, God brought water out of the rock. When Joshua aligned his will with the will of God, the sun stood still in its orbit. When David aligned his will with the will of God, Goliath fell. When Elijah aligned his will with the will of God, fire came from heaven on Mount Carmel and licked up everything, including the water. And when Daniel aligned his will with the will of God, the lions’ mouths were zipped.”1
And the exciting part about lining up our prayers with God’s will is that when we do this we can claim the wonderful Scriptural promise found in (1 John 5:14-15): “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.”
And I believe that when we ask according to God’s will that this implies our primary motive is that God be glorified through His answer. My friends if you want to revolutionize your prayer life then seek out God’s will on every matter, pray that God be glorified by our prayer, and watch God answer in His perfect time and in His perfect way!