As believers, we delight in coming to God in prayer with our praise, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. Scripture tells us that in prayer God hears us when we submit our wills to Him (1 John 5:14), and that we must prayerfully seek His wisdom in His Word (James 1:5). As we delight in this, we also experience God’s own delight as He responds to our petitions and receives our praise. Thus, as we come before God in prayer, we have the joy of unhindered access to Him and the privilege of experiencing His care in supplying all our needs.
The truth of God’s kindness in caring for His children should encourage us to draw ever nearer to Him through prayer. The Puritan Stephen Charnock, in considering how God’s good nature affects how we approach Him in prayer, wrote,
“The greatness of God, joined with his goodness, hath more reason to encourage our approach to him than our flight from him, because his greatness never goes unattended with his goodness. . . . How may his goodness in the great gift of his Son encourage us to apply to him, since he hath set him as [an arbiter] between himself and us, and appointed him an advocate to present our requests for us, and speed them at the throne of grace, and he never leaves till divine goodness subscribes a fiat to our believing and just petitions.”
Since God is great, He has the power to help us; since He is good, He desires to do so. He lovingly cares about us, our needs, and our maturity in Christ. As David prayed, “The eyes of Yahweh are toward the righteous, and His ears are open to their cry for help” (Ps. 34:15). God listens to His children when they cry out to Him, and, as His children, we can approach our heavenly Father “with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16). Indeed, our commitment to prayer is the overflow of our dependence and trust in God’s goodness as we daily rely on Him with all of our hearts.
As a church, we endeavor to be a people devoted to this kind of trusting prayer. To this end, we are gathering every Sunday morning through the month of July to pray specifically for our church and its ministries, beginning next Sunday, July 2. Join us as we delight in God’s goodness and everlasting lovingkindness!