Prayer Is Delighting In the Glory of God

Prayer is abandoning my addiction to other glories and delighting in the one glory that is truly glorious—the glory of God.

Sadly, prayer for many of us has been shrunk to an agenda that is little bigger than asking God for stuff. It has become that spiritual place where we ask God to sign our personal wish lists. For many, it is little more than a repeated cycle of requesting, followed by waiting to see if God, in fact, comes through. If he does, we celebrate his faithfulness and love; but if he doesn’t, we not only wonder if he cares, we are also tempted to wonder if he’s there. In this way, prayer often amounts to shopping at the Trinitarian department store for things that you have told yourself you need with the hope that they will be free.

But consider the Lord’s Prayer for a moment. It doesn’t look anything like what I’ve just described. This prayer is a prayer of worship and surrender. It recognizes, at the deepest level, the war that still goes on in my heart between the kingdom of self and the kingdom of God. It faces the fact that I can be so blind to the glory of God, and as I am, I become captured by the small glories of the created world. It does more surrendering and celebrating than it does asking. And the asking that it does is in the context not of self-glory wishing, but rather in the context of submission and worship.

How does this prayer begin? It begins by reminding you of the most astounding reality of your life. It begins with a celebration of grace: “Our Father in heaven . . .” (Matt. 6:9a). You and I must never stop celebrating this reality. God, the Creator, King, Savior, and Lord, exercised his power and grace so that people like us would become his children. What’s next? “Hallowed be your name” (v. 9b). Here I surrender myself to the agenda of agendas. It is the reason the world was made. It is why you and I were created. It was all brought into being so that God would get the glory that he is due. Here I let go of all the other glories that may lay claim to my wandering heart. Here I find my motivation for all that I do. Here I cry out for rescuing grace for my disloyal heart.

Then this model prayer hits its bottom line. The next words contain a comfort and a call: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (v. 10). The comfort is that the Father, in redeeming love, has graciously chosen to give us his kingdom. He blesses us with his rule, which is always wise, loving, faithful, true, gracious, and good, and in so doing, rescues us from our little kingdoms of one. The call is to let go of our Vise-Grip hold on our Lilliputian kingdoms and give ourselves to his kingdom of glory and grace. It is only when our hearts have been protected by the worship and celebration of these requests that we are able to properly pray what comes next.

For further study and encouragement: Matthew 6:5–15 

This week's free devotional is  from New Morning Mercies by Paul David Tripp, available at OMF Lit Bookshops and shop.omflit.com for P550. 

Mornings can be tough. Sometimes, a hearty breakfast and a strong cup of coffee just aren’t enough. Offering more than a rush of caffeine, best-selling author Paul David Tripp wants to energize you with the most potent encouragement imaginable: the Gospel.

Forget “behavior modification” or feel-good aphorisms. Tripp knows that what we really need is an encounter with the living God. Then we’ll be prepared to trust in God’s goodness, rely on his grace, and live for his glory each and every day.

New Morning Mercies is a devotional book with 365 meditations on gospel truths originally expressed in Paul David Tripp’s Twitter posts. Each day’s reading opens with Tripp’s gospel tweets and then a meditation that expands on it.