Prayer Grows our Relationship with God
June 04, 2025
Hello, my SUMite friends. It’s a chilly winter’s day in Sydney. But the sun has come out after a morning of drizzle and cloud.
I’ve been studying growing relationally with Lord through our prayer both individually and within a corporate church environment. One element struck me that I thought I’d share today believing it will be useful for a few of us.
Fix-it Prayers
We often learn to pray by asking God for things, for help, to ‘fix’ things. There is nothing wrong with such prayers. In fact, they are often the most powerful, especially when prayed with a degree of desperation.
The Lord’s Prayer, the most famous prayer that Jesus taught us includes requests for things:
“Give us our daily bread
Forgive us our sins”
Acknowledging God
Imagine if you had a relationship where the only way the two of you communicated was by asking for things. Sometimes our relationships with our children can move in and out of such a state, teenagers, anyone?
A good relationship doesn’t survive when the basis of the connection is on receiving or getting things. A good relationship requires acknowledging who each other is, expressing our thoughts about each other, and praising the good things each has done.
Going back to the Lord’s Prayer, we see how Jesus taught us to both acknowledge God and to recognise who He is.
“Our Father who art in heaven …”
It’s starts with familiarity: “Our Father”, like greeting our loved one.
“Hallowed be Your Name,
Your Kingdom come, Your Will be done
On earth as it is in heaven …”
We acknowledge and praise God for who He is and what He can do. We open our dialogue with Him to connect, to build a relationship of love and kindness.
Then we move to requesting He help us in whatever is going on in our life and in those around us.
Nothing New
I’m sure for most of us none of this is anything new. But it struck me that in some of my prayer meetings, we can miss this first part and dive into ‘give us our daily bread.’
It made me think that sometimes (perhaps often) when I’m praying for the salvation of loved ones, I forget to connect with God before asking for His help.
It’s like our child rushing in after school and asking us to make them something to eat before having spent a few minutes just being together and catching up on the day.
I hope you might have found this a positive reminder. Our loving God so loves us that being with Him is better than anything He can give us.
As David reminds us in Psalm 63, “You love is better than life, my lips will praise you.”
Go well, my friends