If you could ask God for anything and you knew He would say “Yes” what would you ask Him for?  How bold would you be?

I’m on an adventure with Jesus in 2016.  I’m reading through the Gospels each month, using a different Harmony of the Gospels to get a fuller picture of the Jesus story.  This month, I’m in Robert Mounce’s Harmony:  Jesus, In His Own Words.

The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is rich with wisdom from Jesus on how to live our lives in a way that pleases God.  Here Jesus spends the better part of a chapter teaching his disciples about the simplicity, necessity and power of prayer.  “Don’t pray like the hypocrites…  go to your room and pray in secret…  don’t babble on with empty phrases like the Gentiles.  Pray like this:  Our Father in heaven…  Do not be anxious about tomorrow…  Ask, and it will be given to you….”  Jesus gives his disciples, and us, a blueprint for prayer that gets the Father’s attention.  Pray earnestly.  Pray personally.  Pray confidently.  Pray specifically.

Jesus wants to remind us of the true nature of His Father.  The way Jesus prayed revealed what He thought about His Father.  The way we pray reflects the way we look at our Father.

Ask. Seek. Knock. If a son asks for bread, will his father give him a stone? If he asks for a fish, will his father give him a snake?  Our Father is better than that. In prayer, do I approach God with the intimacy, affection and confidence of a loving Father…  or do I approach him as GOD, Creator, Almighty, Holy. He IS all of that, but He invites me to approach Him as Father, Daddy, Papi, Papa.

What does the way that I pray (how frequently/directly/confidently) reveal about what I think of God?

What does the way that you pray reveal about what you think of God?