prayer

Six months ago or so, our family was driving back from visiting my family in NE Iowa when we encountered traffic at a stand-still on I-80 at the Iowa/Illinois border. Now, I consider myself a patient man, but when you have two kids in tow with no food, no water, and no bathroom, things can get ugly. After 40 minutes of inching forward on the concrete corridor and much debate, we hesitantly decided to take the first exit off the interstate in an attempt to bypass the construction and re-join the interstate further to east. So we exited I-80 and headed south on Highway 84—one of those winding river roads adjacent to the Mighty Mississippi. Only there was one little problem with our little detour adventure—we didn’t have GPS and we didn’t have a map. We were headed south but we knew we had to get east. But we didn’t know how to get there. It wouldn’t be long before we would be lost. Thinking to myself we had made a terrible mistake, I prayed silently, “Lord, we’re lost…please Lord help us.”

So, maybe you’ve “been there” too—lost on a county road unsure of where to go next. But thankfully [if we push our pride aside] we can pause in the midst of our wandering and ask for directions. And that’s just what we did, and we made it back to the interstate.

Prayer is like asking for directions when we’re lost, and it’s important to remember first where we are in relation to our Heavenly Father—in short, we’re lost. We’re separated from our Source by sin and confessing where we are [or where we have been] is the place to start to getting back on the highway of life. And after we confess, it seems appropriate to begin asking God for direction. Sometimes we call this prayers of intercession where we ask for God’s leading, direction, healing, sanctification, provision, power, and for God’s good gifts. The Book of James says, “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (5:16). Confession followed by intercession. So the intent of the next couple posts is to give you, the reader, insight into cultivating a deeper, more fruitful prayer life by focusing on two kinds of prayer— first, “Lord, I’m lost,” and second, “Lord please help.”