Two ways to pray

Why do we pray? Have you ever thought about that before? I mean, like, if God knows everything, then, like, why do we tell him things? Are we informing him about what we need or what's going on in our life? Does he not know the happenings of the world, or what's going on in the world, or the wildfires that are raging, or any of the bad or evil things that are happening, or the hunger, or the needs that there are? You know, it's recorded also that people of all shapes and sizes pray to God—that people that don't even necessarily believe, even some atheists or agnostic or non-religious pray, which begs the question: who do we pray to? Who are we praying to? Are we praying to some vague idea of a deistic god out there somewhere? Are we praying to this blind universe that sort of, hoping, like casting pennies into a wishing well, that something or someone will hear us? Are we just talking to ourselves, to some sort of Soul or Spirit within us, hoping that things will be better, hoping for the best? And how should we pray? What should we talk about when we pray? What is the point of prayer? Is it—is it just to list out the things that are going on in our life and just to talk about ourselves and our needs or any of these things, or—or just to kind of go through this ritualistic pattern of the day: "God bless his food," "God give us traveling mercies," "God help us," "help those people," "bless those people"? What is the point of prayer? Is prayer necessary? Should we be praying? And we know that the scriptures tell us that we are to pray. And—and—and in my own life, yet though I for many years, many years, would, you know, know the word and know the word of God and study God's word, and I would pray, and yet I reached this point in my own life where I began to ask these kinds of questions: if God knows everything, why am I praying? What is the point of prayer? What am I trying to accomplish, or what should be accomplished? How should I be doing it? And I know that I'm not alone. I know that if I had journeyed this long in my life, if I knew God's word and had been serving and seeking him for so long, and yet at the same time my prayers felt ordinary—they felt shallow, they felt like this—this thing that I had to do. They didn't even always feel very lifegiving; it was just a box that I was checking, it was just this thing that I was doing. And yes, I hoped, and yes, I kind of cast up my needs to God, and yes, I did petition for people and for others, but it just felt like a task. And yet, I would hear the Saints of old talk about how deep and personal prayer was. I would hear about how they had this rich and deep prayer life. I would hear how they could pray for hours on in, how Jesus himself could go all night and pray, and I would think, "What do you talk about? I can't talk about anything that long. How are we supposed to pray that kind of prayer? What did they have that I don't have?" I even heard a longtime Pastor, Tim Keller, who was a pastor in New York City for many, many years, and he made it all the way into his early 50s. Not until 2001, when 911 hit, did he really begin to take inventory and say, "I need to deepen my prayer life. I don't think that I have the kind of prayer life that they're talking about in the scriptures and that the Saints of old were talking about in their lives. I need something more. I need prayer to be whatever it is that God is talking about to us in the scriptures." And that's when he began that journey. And even for myself, I began that same journey, and I began to learn, after all these years, prayer is Rich and it is vast and it is powerful and it is lifegiving. And yet, at the same time, it took me forever to begin to realize this. And yet, I know I'm not alone. I know that probably many of us would ask the same questions: why is it so hard, and am I doing it right, and what does it mean to pray deep, what does it mean to pray hard, what does it mean to have a rich prayer life? The Journey of prayer is a difficult one, and it's one that many Saints of old and even many today have struggled to the depths to find what it is. Jesus today is going to be talking about prayer, and he's going to really be talking about two ways to pray. He's going to tell us a way that we should not pray and a way that we should pray. And he does this because he's showing us a better way to pray, because if we pray rightly, Prayer Will rightly Orient us to God. It will connect us to God, and it will help us to experience the awe and the power and the intimacy that we discover in prayer, and in that, we actually find something about ourselves in those prayers. So let's take a look today. If you will, turn with me to Matthew chapter 6. It's also on the screen here for us. Matthew chapter 6, we're going to be looking at the Lord's Prayer, um, and we're going to start in verse 7: "And when you pray, do not Heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Don't be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven, Hallowed Be Your Name. Your Kingdom Come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but Deliver Us from Evil. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly father will forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses." As we look at this, we see that Jesus is clearly telling us how not to pray, but he's also calling us to pray a certain way. And so today, we're going to look at what Jesus is telling us about not praying—about not praying a certain way—how Jesus is telling us to pray, why Jesus wants us to pray in this way, and how do we pray like that. And so what I want to First Look at is how and why Jesus is telling us not to pray a certain way. He says right there in verse 7: "And when you pray, do not Heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words." Why is Jesus telling us not to pray this way? And really, it's because we tend to revert to that way of praying. We tend to make it rote; we tend to make it quick; we tend to—to just, uh, Heap up prayers to God. The—the Greek there is this idea of just babbling words to God that don't necessarily make sense, or they're just repetitive over and over, the same things. And we do this all the time in our life. We find into ways where we might say, you know, where we fall into these patterns: "God bless this day," "be with us today." What does that mean? What does that mean for God to bless us today? What does that mean for God to be with us today? And so Jesus is saying to us that sometimes we can fall into these patterns of prayer that just sort of throw up empty phrases and words that used to mean something or maybe should mean something, but we're not striking at the core of what God wants from us in prayer. In fact, he already knows that we have those needs. Of course he wants to bless us; of course he wants to be with us. And so why is he telling us not to pray this way? And part of it is because there's nothing that really engages Us in that kind of prayer; they're just empty phrases sometimes that we lob up. And I'm not judging, and I'm not kicking or anything; I find myself gravitating to this way. And why is it? It's because it's easier. It's easier to pray that way sometimes in our busyness and our hustle: "I just need to get my prayers before God." And yet, God wants us to do the hard work of prayer—the intimate work, the Deep work of approaching the throne room of God and entering in and talking to him and with him. And so prayer is much deeper, and Jesus wants us to journey in there because we tend to revert into these ways where we move into shallow Waters. But there's something else going on here, because what we can also begin to do with our prayers is manipulate. We think that if we say the right words, or if we pray hard enough, or we pray long enough, or we just say the same things over and over and over before God, that somehow, magically, this is going to arm wrestle God into doing what we want him to do—and he needs to hurry up with it at the same time—and it becomes manipulative in that way. Now hear me, I'm not saying that you shouldn't pray hard. I'm not saying that you shouldn't pray for some things for years where over and over you petition God for things, but at the end of the day, it should never be about manipulation. It should always be about coming before God, who was Sovereign, and saying, "I pray this way, I'm asking for these things, but your will be done," and so I will submit to that at the end of the day. But also, what can happen in this is it can become consumeristic, because our prayers can turn in such a way of where I'm coming to God with the things that I'm asking of him, the things that I need from him, and pretty soon, our prayers can only become these things that we just throw up as a laundry list: "I need God to bless me," "go—I need God to protect me," "I want God to watch over this thing." Those are good things, I'm not kicking them, but God wants us—and there's nothing about our heart that really begins to engage him in those places. And Jesus is saying, "You can pray that way, but your prayers will never have the richness and the depth that is available to you if you will pray this other way." So God wants us to move, Jesus wants us to move beyond the shallowness, beyond the repetitive phrases, beyond the stammering, into something much deeper. So how does Jesus tell us to pray? And one of the things that he says here at the beginning is he says, "Pray then like this," or "pray in this way," or "pray in this manner." And that means that we don't necessarily pray this as a script. Now, you could pray the Lord's Prayer—there's nothing wrong with praying the prayer, that's fine—but there's something about God's word right here that has all sorts of deep implications. God, at the end of the day, wants to show us things from his word that help move us into relationship with him so that—that we pray in this manner. And we're going to look at the manner of this in just a second of how we pray, because there's all sorts of depths and interesting things that are in this prayer, but yet aren't quite in this prayer. And that's because some of them are implied as we Ponder the scriptures and we look over them. For example, there's no real confession actually in here, and in many ways, there's no Thanksgiving present, but they are implied as we Ponder the scriptures and as we meditate upon them, and so we can move more deeply in into the Lord's Prayer by praying in this manner. But Jesus is telling us, number one, who we are praying with: our father. And as we Ponder what that means, we remember that God relates to us personally. The god of the universe—who are you talking to? You're talking to—to your father. And not every father's been perfect in this life, and I understand that we've not had perfect parents in our life, but ultimately, the way that God does want to relate to us is the way that he intended parents to relate to us: with this unconditional love, with this nurturing, with this guiding hand over our lives, with all of the good things that we find from a—a good parent. And what a good parent should be, we find these things from God himself, and that when we come to God, we ought to with that same dependency, that same trust, that same relationship and safety, that we can move into that same intimacy that a child has with their parent, stand before God, and remember: you're talking to your father. And it's not about manipulation, and it's not just about a laundry list of needs. You're not just talking to him; Jesus wants us to talk with him, to hear him, to sense him, and to respond to him. So we need to remember who it is we are talking to. We also need to remember the how. What we find very early on in here is, "Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be thy name." Let your name be holy; let it be kept and made holy. And it's this idea of worship, of holding God High, wanting God's name to be glorified, wanting to live in such a way as to represent him well as the people that bear his name in this world. And so we see that God is also reminding us how we should pray—that there should be a worship and an adoration as we approach God into our prayers. John Calvin, who was a—a reformer and a theologian, um, had these sort of rules or guidelines, if you will, for prayer. But one of the things that he would talk about even before that was that we needed to have the right posture as we approached prayer: the right sense of awe, the right sense of reverence, that our heart needed to know that we were about to talk and connect with the god of the universe, The God Who Loved Us, the all power and almighty God, and that it should produce within us a certain state of heart as we entered into prayer. And that right prayer started with the right condition of the Heart. Right prayer started—ed with the right condition of the heart. And what do we pray? Is it just the laundry list of needs? No, no, it's to pray all sorts of things. Even within here, you can find directly this idea of—of worship in the prayer; we can see confession, we can see Thanksgiving, we can see petition. But ultimately, God wants us to come with dependency to him, to Humble ourselves, to present ourselves to him, and we begin to find prayer is a conversation with god. It's this raw conversation with god where we talk with him. Some of the most genuine and sincere prayers aren't the ones where we just pray repetitively, but we come to God and say, "I'm angry, I'm lonely, I'm afraid." And sometimes in those prayers, those honest and raw prayers, we're bringing ourselves before God, and we're talking to him and with him in a very intimate way that begins to invite his presence and his word into that conversation. This is how Jesus wants us to pray: to include these things. Because when we begin to pray these ways, when we begin to petition God, but we also begin to praise God, when we begin to look outside of our world to the world around us, and we begin to pray that God's kingdom would move, that—that Hearts would be changed—"God, that you would forgive me of this thing," "God, that you would shape me and change me," "God, be glorified and honored"—what begins to happen is that we begin to start reflecting God, begin to start reflecting his character and his likeness, because prayer is beginning to shape us. Now, why does Jesus want us to pray this way? And ultimately, the—Jesus wants us to pray this way because he wants us to be connected to God our father. He doesn't want us—because when you just pray scripted things, or when you just pray repetitive things that are light and the shallow—"God bless this," "God help this day," "God watch over us through this day"—those aren't really moving into the throne room of God. It doesn't mean that they're bad; it's—it's wrong to ask God of those things. God wants us to connect with us deeply. He wants you—and when you're honest with God, when you lay yourself bear before God, when you begin to—to to move in all these different ways and connect with God, you begin to find that God meets with you. When you tell God that you were lonely, God begins to speak to you. God's presence begins to feel your prayers. God doesn't just leave you; he said to you, "I will never leave you, I will never forsake you." And sometimes in those raw prayers, the moments when God begins to peel back the barriers and he begins to enter into us and enter into these places—and it's not just the words we say, it's what we begin to experience in these words and the words that we pray, but also the words that God begins to say back to us. Often times, we'll recall scriptures and verses and things that come from God's word, and he speaks those things over us, he sings those things over us, and it—even though it's a harder work, it's a richer work, it's one that's raw and honest where we begin to experience God and His presence, and—and there's all sorts of ways that through that, we are—we are moved to Great Heights. Let me—let me give you an example of that. Um, there's a—there's a pastor from several hundred years ago, his name was Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards meditated upon God's scripture, and he—and he recorded Memoirs of sometimes what he sensed as he would move into prayer. And—and hear this where he says, sometimes only mentioning a single word, so he's reading God's word, sometimes only mentioning a single word caused my heart to burn within me. We're only seeing the name of Christ or the name come or the at or some attribute of God, and God has appeared glorious to me on account of the Trinity. It has made me leave have exalting thoughts of God, that he subsists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The sweetest Joys and delights I have experienced and have not been those that have Arisen from a hope of my own good state, but in direct view of the Glorious thing of the Gospel. So—so Jonathan Edwards is really reading these scriptures, and he's beginning to have his heart moved in certain ways, and—and this isn't just one time. He records these all the time. I mean, they're just page after page of his Memoirs, you know. He talks about, "I was walking and I had this Divine contemplation and prayer that I had in view that for me was extraordinary of the glory of the Son of God as mediator between God and man, and his wonderful great, full, pure, and sweet Grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension. This grace that appear—appeared so calm and sweet also was great above the heavens." He goes on, he says, "I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise, and I don't know how to express it. I was emptied to lie in the dust, and yet to be full of Christ Alone." See what Edwards was—was talking about is that he was—he was hearing from God, and he was talking to God, and he was meditating on God's word, and it was moving in these places of prayer, but then it began to just shape him. It began to move his heart in certain ways, and—and he began to experience moments of just like on the floor humbling. He talks about times where he just would ball and cry and weep and mourn, and then he has these times of just exultant Joy. Do you see all the different varied emotions that begins to experience in that? We can find them in these ways here, or even in the Lord's Prayer. We're moved to places of—of dependency on God; we're moved to pray for his kingdom to come; we pray for God's forgiveness and that he not lead us into these dark seasons of Temptation and testing and trial. And so our prayers can be varied in the ways that we can experience God, can be varied in so many ways. And why is it that Jesus wants us to pray this way? Ultimately, it is because he wants us to connect us with God. He wants our prayers not to be these things we say, but these things that we experience. Yes, we say and we pray, but sometimes my most sincere prayer is I say a few words and then I'm just sitting with God—I'm waiting on him. I've entered into—to that throne room, and then I'll be moved to places of petition and places of confession. This is what Jonathan Edwards is talking about in these moments: that ultimately, Jesus himself, guys, he wants us to experience that—that he wants our prayers to be more. He wants us to move beyond the shallow Waters of prayer into the deep places where we experience God. And why? Because not only does it connect us to God, but in those prayers our soul becomes nourished. It becomes a food voice us. You ever prayed or maybe wept in your prayer, and then you got up and you dried your eyes and you just felt the peace of God flood over you? You ever prayed and just been moved to passion—and sometimes angry, not at God, but at the Brokenness in this world? Have you ever cared deeply about people you shouldn't really care about, but something is burning in your heart—some maybe even a stranger you don't know—and you just feel like God is impressing it upon you, God is using you in your prayer, he's moving you? See, you've opened up your heart to God, you've moved Beyond just the laundry list, and all sorts of things begin to open up. You knock down that wall, you begin to experience God, you begin to experience God's emotion and God's heart, and you begin to connect to that. And there will be moments where you feel—feel humbl; there will be moments where you feel invigorated; there will be moments where you feel passionate and you desire to see God do something in this world. What's happening? You're sensing God's heart. You can tell a lot about a person based upon what makes them angry, what makes them sad—sad, what makes them afraid, what makes them laugh. We can tell a lot about ourselves, because people can laugh at things that aren't funny sometimes, people can be entertained by things that aren't funny. It's the same with God. We move into these places, and we begin to feel what brings God great joy, begin to feel and sense and know and experience what Grieves God, and it begins to move our voice and our words and our heart in line with what God is feeling and what God is praying and expressing to this world as well. We're feeling him, we're sensing him, and you go up that mountain, friend, and you will come down different. You begin to walk into the throne room of God, you begin to experience his heart, you begin to experience the emotions of God in your life, you begin to pray and open yourself up into those ways, and—and—and you begin to—to find that your heart is beginning to reflect his heart, and it will change you. It will make your personality and your character different. It's not an outward thing of like, "Let me try to be a better person, let me try to..." Something about stepping into the—the room with God, going up the Holy Mountain of God, experiencing him, seeing him, knowing him, that you come back down and you're different. And God wants us to go up the mountain with him in prayer. He wants us to go into the deep and the hard places that require more time, that require the effort, but they will shape us. And Jesus wants us to pray this way because he wants us to pray from places of power and of transformation for our own selves and for this world. All right, so all this sounds great, but how in the world do we do this? What does this look like? And this is where I got stuck. This is—for me, I understood, yeah, prayer should be awesome, it should be great, I should have a better prayer life, but I don't know how to get there, and this feels really hard and very difficult. And this is where, for me, that I began to understand something that I had to look at some of the Saints of old, because at the end of the day, um, God wants us to pray deeply. And maybe I'll say it this way: um, there's a—there's a pastor you Peterson, many people know him because he wrote the—wrote the message, which is a translation, kind of a modern day translation of the Bible. And one of the things that—that Eugene Peterson, he wrote a short book, uh, reflecting on the Psalms. The title of the book was called answering God. And one of the things that he talked about in the book is that God speaks to us—he speaks to us first. He speaks to us through his word, and then it causes and stirs us to respond to God. And that—that—that sometimes that the best way to learn how to pray to God and to talk to God is to First hear God—to hear him in his word—and then to—to—to meditate and to ponder upon that word and let it move us to places of all sorts of prayer. Psalm 1: "I meditate upon your word day and night." The psalmist is called us even there in that preamble to the Psalms—the very first chapter. If you're going to pray the Psalms, which were the prayer book of Jesus's day, Psalm 1 is teaching us what it—what and how to pray: you start by meditating, reflecting on God's word, um, and through that, we begin to see and learn how to respond to God's word. Let me give you one more real quick. This is—this was to me very instrumental: George Mueller. George Mueller was a missionary, founded orphanages, um, and, uh, was a pastor. This is what George Mueller—he had quite a devotional life, and this is just another Peak into someone's memo of what they said about this before. So hear him real quick before this time: "My practice had been, at least for 10 years previously as a habitual thing, to give myself to prayer having—after having dressed for the morning. I saw that the most important thing I had to do was give myself to the reading of God's word and a meditation on it, and thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, approved, instructed, and that thus while meditating, my heart might be brought into experimental communion with God. I began, therefore, to meditate on the New Testament from the beginning, early in the morning." So it's written a little bit of older English, but, uh, the first thing I did, after having asked in a few words the Lord's blessing upon his precious word, was to begin to meditate on the word of God. So you hear what he's doing? He's—he's going into his quiet time, and he's just reading the word of God. And he says this, searching it, as it were, for every verse to get blessing out of it—not for the sake of preaching in public Ministry, but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul. The result I found to be almost invariably this: that after a few minutes, my soul had been led to confession, or to Thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication, so that though I did not, as it were, give to prayer but to meditation, yet it almost immediately more or less turned to prayer. You hear what—what was happening there? What he's doing is he's reading God's word, and he's beginning to see things in there, and he hears God speaking from the word, and he begins to turn him to places of prayer. Then he goes on and says, "when thus I had been for a while making confession or intercession or supplication, or had given thanks, I go to the next verse, turning all—I go on into prayer for myself or others, and the word—as the word may lead, lead, but still continually keeping me before the food of my own soul, the object of meditation. The result is this: that there is always a good deal of confession, Thanksgiving, supplication, or intercession mingled with my meditation, and that my inner man almost invariably, even sensibly, nourished and strengthened, that by breakfast time, with rare exception, I am peaceful, if not in Happy State of heart." Now, here's one thing though that he does say. He says, "now former practice, my present one is this: I would get up—huh—I began to pray as soon as possible, and generally spent all my time till breakfast in prayer, and at all the events, I most invariably began with prayer." But what was the result? "I often spent a quarter of an hour, or even half an hour, or even an hour on my knees before being conscious to myself [so he's been praying, and he's like, 'I prayed for a long time, I prayed for like half an hour or an hour'] but then I became conscious of myself—having derived comfort and encouragement, humbling of soul, but often having suffered from much wandering of the mind for the first 10 minutes, or a quarter of an hour, or even half an hour. Only then did I really begin to pray." So you see the problem? What he's saying is that, "I went to pray, and I didn't really know what to say, or I would start and then my mind would kind of start wandering all over the place and nothing..." and then you'd be like, "Oh man, I haven't been praying, I've been thinking about all these other things of the day." But he says that—that the word of God actually became this guard rail or this thing that he could hold on to to guide him through his prayer, and he almost never turned his thoughts to other distractions. It's like the word was speaking to him, and then he was responding, and he read more, and it was just this EB and flow that was beginning to happen, and it was diverse. And—and what did he experience? What was the mood that came out of it? What were the things that happened? We felt moments of great confession, moments of great joy, and he says it was food for my soul—food for me. And so we begin to see this Rhythm that begins to happen in his life, and this can be something that—that any of us can also do in our own lives, that we can read even a word where it's like—you see this sometimes in that moment—you begin to read the word, number one, with more engagement of it. You may read the words where, like, Jesus in John 15 says, "I chose you." Now, granted, he's talking to his disciples, but then you think, "Well, I'm his disciple." And then—"God, this is not—we're—we're not doing exod Jesus of the text now, we're just listening, we're reminded: I chose you. I chose you." "God chose me? God, I don't know, I feel like I'm going through this stuff and I'm not sure if you love..." "I chose you." And you begin to hear God speaking to you, and it begins to move you in places of prayer. See, this is ultimately what—what God and what Jesus is telling us here is he's showing us there is a better way to pray. There's a deeper and richer and more vibrant... and I'm telling you, if you've not experience this, it will make you into a kind of person that can pray and experience prayer in a whole different way. It's knocking down a wall. And we find that, "I'm not just making it up, and I didn't just read it in a trendy book. These are things that the Saints of old were describing that they were doing, and somewhere along the lines, Christians have turned and we've forgotten these ancient roots and these paths that help us to pray more deeply. And that is the path that Christ is offering to us in this diverse and wonderful prayer—to see all the ways you don't manipulate God, you don't pray in Shallow ways, you don't just script your prayer. You hear me and you respond to me, and we can use scripture as the guide for us, and we can pray for oursel. And if we will learn to pray this way, if we will travel up the mountain of prayer, the Mountain of God, you won't come down the same." So today, we're going to pray the Lord's Prayer, but before we do, I actually just want to provide maybe just something—just—just Hands-On. Realize it's a little bit different, but I—I don't want to—to just hear a nice sermon on prayer and—um—and for us to go, "Okay, that was great, I'm not even sure what he was talking about, I don't even know what that looks like." So I want us to do a couple things. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to pray just a couple—just a couple times. I'm going to take a section of scripture, and then I—of—of the Lord's Prayer, and then just on that little bit, I'm going to provide a few sentences of reflection, and then I'm going to wait for about 15 seconds. And I just want you to just—you just to sit there for a minute. Don't sit there with me; sit there with God. I want you to hear that word, and I just want to see, like, maybe the Lord will speak to you, maybe you'll just reflect on something about that word. And—and I realize it's much more better if you're—if you're doing it on your own and not in a room here, but I want us to practice it for a second. I just want us to see... then the third time, I'll actually model it, and so there won't be a moment of silence; I will just go straight into prayer praying that. Um, so if you would bow your heads with me... So again, I will read something, and then I'm going to give us about 15 seconds, and then I'll repeat it, and then I'll model it for you. Our Father... How is it that we can call the god of the universe Our Father? Kings don't know us, nor the president, and yet the ruler of the universe relates to us personally. He bids us to call upon him as our own father. He adopts us into his family. He knows us and wants us to address him as one so close and so loving as our father... who is in heaven... God is above, we are below. He is perfect and Heavenly, we are not. His ways are not like our ways; his thoughts are not like our thoughts. He is high, he is different, he is set apart, he is Holy, he is beyond even that which we can fully conceive. He is more, and there is more in him. He is not of this world, and even the heavens cannot fully contain his glory... give us this day our daily bread... father, you provide a bounty of bread. I know the righteous never go hungry or beg for bread. The Lord is the supplier of my needs and our needs. Thank you, Father, that though we have walked through the fire and the flood, the Lord has brought us into a place of abundance, and you have always provided for our needs. I ask not only for the bread that wastes away, but the Bread of Heaven, that you might fill my soul and nourish me, that you might portion to me all that my soul really needs and Longs for. I thirst and I hunger for you. What bread is better than to do your will and to Feast upon the bread of life? Why are you so generous to supply what I need and even offer bread that is lasting and satisfying to me? I have and want nothing more, but keep me from hungering or seeking bread that cannot satisfy. Portion to me according to my needs: the peace I need for today, the strength that I need for today. Thank you that you were so willing to give good gifts to one so undeserving as me. I cringe to think that I have sometimes squandered the bread that you supplied; I have eaten and not given thanks or even pondered where it came from. I wrongly concluded that it was by the work of my own hands. Forgive me for neglecting and assuming so wrongly. Thank you for your mercy, which is like bread that you also Supply so abundantly to those who ask. I pray that your goodness and your mercy would continually chase after me, and let me daily sit at your table and enjoy the bread of Fellowship is found in you. If you would stand with me as we say the Lord's Prayer together.