Prayer as Conversation



Pray without ceasing, (1 Thessalonians 5:17)

Praying is just talking to God. He does not require fancy words or long drawn out discourses. He just wants to hear from us. He wants us to bring our concerns to Him even though He already knows them. He wants our praise and our respect for Him. He wants to be our best friend.

You can't have a close relationship with someone you never talk to. Hopefully we all have  conversations with God on a regular basis. Jesus is our friend and brother besides our Lord and Savior so talking to Him throughout the day is valuable to our well-being. It relieves a lot of stress.

God's word encourages us to pray without ceasing and Christ, Himself, taught us how to pray in what we know as the Lord's prayer.  We can find the prayer in the gospels. One such place is Matthew 6:5-15.  This prayer can be a pattern for our own prayers if we want to use it.

Christ's prayer begins with 'Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name'. This is praise. It is important to include praise for God's goodness in our prayers. We owe Him so much.

It continues.'thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven'. This is yielding to God's plan. We want God's leading in our lives so that we don't follow a wrong path or make bad decisions. Asking for His guidance and letting Him know that we will yield to His will, even when it doesn't match up with our will, can be difficult.

The Lord's prayer continues with 'give us this day our daily bread'  which is when we ask for our needs and sometimes our wants. Obviously Christ included this so that we would know it is acceptable to talk to God about what is going on in our lives and what we would like to see happen.

'Forgive us our trespasses (debts) as we forgive those who trespass against us' is next. God always forgives our sins when we confess them and ask for forgiveness, but we must also forgive others as He forgives us.

'Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil' is close to the end of the Lord's prayer. Here Christ instructs us to ask for protection from the evil in this world. God has power and authority over everything and can direct us away from evil and temptations that we may fall into.


Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. (Philippians 4:6)



Christ directed us to pray and included these parts of prayer as being important but we do not need to follow a format when we pray unless it helps us. When we don't know how to pray or are asked to pray in front of a group and don't want to sound like an idiot, we can use the parts of the Lord's prayer to cover everything we need to pray about. This acronym has the part of the Lord's prayer (although not in the order of the Lord's prayer) and can help us to remember to praise God, yield to God's plan and not just ask, ask, ask.

It is the word PRAY
P    PRAISE
R    REPENT
A    ASK
Y    YIELD

In our constant conversations with God, He wants us to just talk to Him as a friend. Let us just remember that praise, repentance and yielding to God's will are just as important as asking for His blessing and that He wants us to forgive others as He forgive us.

“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.(Matthew 6:7)


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