How will we pray this week?

It seems to me that so often people regard prayer as an opportunity to tell God what they want!

For many, prayer is the opportunity to return to the childhood days - when you wanted something, all we needed to do was . . .

Climb on his knee and tell Him what we wanted!

And for so many of us, this is the model of prayer we've adopted and used in our Christian lives.

The question has to be: How will you pray this week?

God knows our needs before we even ask. We pray to remind ourselves how important people and things are, not to tell God what we want Him to do.

Perhaps, for many of us, having lost sight of this can best be explained by this . . .

There are others of us who will be totally bound up in the formulaic ACTS - a great thing to teach people to pray, moving past the 'gimme, gimme.gimme' praying. But so often ACTS is the end point, not the starting point - so if that's what we think prayer is, then we need to grow our prayer life a bit more.

And of course there's that prayer we ought to be saying every day:

Let's try to pray for people and things in a different, more engaged, less demanding way this week and perhaps, where we can be the answer - we will determine to be the answer!