Starting 2025 in prayer.

There is nothing more important or harder or richer or more life altering than prayer. There is absolutely nothing so great as prayer. Where do we begin? For those of us who struggle and find it hard to pray, including myself, a good place to start would be to ask the Lord to give you a desire and a longing to pray.

Pray that simple prayer. Ask Him to give you a hunger to pray. He will answer that prayer, I promise you. And then I would encourage all of us to practice some silence and some solitude in order for us to pray, in order for God to lead us.

We are people who are addicted to noise, and we must break that habit. And if you want a rich and meaningful prayer life, we must have some silence and solitude. And you must make an effort, because everything is working against us there.

We can pray any place, anytime, anywhere. We can pray with our eyes closed or our eyes open, with our hands stretched to heaven, or our hands by our side, or folded in our lap. We can pray on our face, on our knees, on our feet. The idea is to pray anytime, any place, anywhere.

Sometimes we don't know what to pray, and so we make our prayers very short. But God left us the Old and New Testament and every just about every one of those verses can be a prompt to pray. It is almost a template that God left in our hands, and now on our phones, that as we read the Scripture we can take a verse and use it as a prompt to know what to pray and how to pray.

Let’s look at Phlippians 2:3-4

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

Our prayer life should reflect this humility, where we stop focusing on our needs for a little while and we take up the interests of others, and cry out to God on their behalf. It takes some humility to stop thinking of ourselves so often.

The best way you can value, honor, and love someone is to pray for them. So let’s make a commitment to pray for one another this year.

How can you remember what to pray? Jesus taught us what to pray in Matthew 6.

“Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

10 Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread, 12 and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

It’s as simple as the word P.R.A.Y.

P is praise - worship and adoration mixed in with a little thanksgiving.

R is repent - confession. Father, forgive me. Father, forgive us.

A is ask. It's seeking. It's knocking. Never be afraid to ask. God doesn't have a little portion that He has to divvy out to us. Our Father in heaven is limitless. Ask, He tells us, persist, persevere.

Y is yield. No matter what I ask, I'm going to say, Father, not my will, but yours be done.

Some of us think that our words are not sufficient in prayer, and we feel inadequate at times and not sharp enough in how to use our words. I want to remind you that as a dad, I love to hear my children's voices. Except when they’re whining… right?

No, but really, when they were infants and they were cooing. I love to hear. When they were toddlers and they were babbling. I love to hear their voices. Now, as they are kids and chattering sometimes quicker than they can breathe. Besides my wife’s beautiful voice, I think that my children’s voices are one of the most favorite sounds I could ever possibly hear in a day.

Can I tell you something? Your Heavenly Father loves to hear your voice. Let him hear it. Let him hear your heart.