Monday, 4 January 2021

You ask amiss

 

You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures. – James 4.2-3

 

You want and we don’t get it. We fight and covet and can’t obtain what we want. We ask for what we want and we don’t get it – because we ask for the wrong things. We ask for the things that we give us pleasure.

 

When we pray too often we are praying amiss. We aren’t not praying for what God wants but we want. We pray for things that are going to please us instead of Him and therefore we don’t receive.

 

The key to that is in Psalm 37.4 – delight yourselves in the Lord and you will receive the desires of your heart.

 

A lot of folks miss the point there. They think that if I delight myself He will give me whatever I want, That’s true, but maybe not exactly in the way it first appear. It says that God will give us the desires, the right desires, His desires. When we have the right desires we can wait on God to answer our prayers. If we are delighting in the Lord instead of ourselves we will learn to have godly desires instead of selfish desires.

 

Lord, fix my desirer so that I don’t ask amiss and see my prayers answered.

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