Prayer

To hear God we need to not only know how we talk to God; we also need to know how God sees us. He sees us in a very different way than we see ourselves. God sees us through the righteousness he has given us. When we know this and live in a constant prayer to understand how dependent we are of God, it becomes easy to hear him and live with him. To be in constant prayer means that we live in and understanding of our dependency of God. In human terms you can say that means we need to hang out with God.

The confusion is sometimes this; we can only see our own faults and weaknesses, but God sees all the righteousness, grace, love, strength, courage he has given us, through Jesus Christ who took all our sins. God can’t see any faults and sins in us. We are created perfect because Jesus took our sins. That is why we should look at Jesus’ face. When we do that, we don’t look at our problems any longer, but at HIM. To God any problem can be solved, therefore we must look at Jesus.

We can only look at one thing at the time, and in that way see who we are. That means there are many realizations when we turn towards Jesus.

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To give our prayer to God

That means that you instead of telling God how the prayers shall be, you give your prayers to him. You tell God about the problem, and then you LISTEN to God. You tell God that he can give you grace to act – if he wants you to do anything, otherwise you remain quiet and still. When we do things on our own without the God’s grace, we often make things worse.

God’s way of solving and healing our situation is so much better, and the solution will always be better when we let him take the control and trust him. He he omniscient, and we are not. That is why it is SO important to give our prayers to God.

Instead of praying: “Give me”, your prayer should be: “Make me the person you want me to be”. When we say: “Give me”, it’s the victim in us that is praying. “Fix my life, Lord. Do this for me, Lord, so that I don’t have to do anything. Give me, give me, give, me, God”. When we pray with the righteousness God has given us, we listen, because we give ourselves to the Lord and ask him to help us in an other way. That is like saying thank you afterwards. It gives our prayer another tone, a thanksgiving prayer – even when we ask for help.

When we pray the “give me-prayer”, we can’t hear what God has for us. If we for instance dream about a new job, we think that we can get that by sending out a lot of applications, and then get a call to an interview, maybe more. Maybe we get a job like this. What we do in this situation is to say: “Lord, give me this job, I really need it”. (Notice that we don’t listen to God, but are based on ourselves and our own understanding.) We might search for a job in the newspaper. We still haven’t asked God what we should do and listened. We might apply for too many jobs. We start getting frustrated and get angry on God. We get more frustrated because: “He doesn’t listen”, and we start to remove ourselves from him.

The other way around – when we give ourselves to God, we give our prayer to God in Jesus name, and then we LISTEN. Then God might say: “Call this and this person”, and it might turn out that this person can offer you a job that in fact is better than you thought possible. The salary might be better, better work hours, closer to home – so it fits with the family, or probably all of those matters. You know; God will give you a full life, not only a little better, but MUCH better – a greater life.

We need to listen much much more, instead of directing God and tell him what he should do for us all the time. When we listen to God, he can introduce us to his greater plans, plans that we can’t begin to imagine.