I love to be encouraged and shown how to pray. The really good prayers speak God's thoughts after Him. They praise God for his Character, state reality plainly, and Worship Him. With this example, we notice that God-centered prayers request the Lord's expressed, written Will. God-centered praying does not make man the center or "self" the target of affection, but Good praying is truly a sweet aroma. Notice how the words are respectful and tender, without the "boyfriend" psychology language that is so typical in our modern praying.
Consider the following prayer a good example of God-centered, Christ-exhalting, Spirit-filled poetry:
"Almighty God of Hosts, we gather this morning as the people, who in thy wisdom, have been made lesser brothers to our Lord Christ. As your people, we desire for thy name to be filled with the glory of which it is always overflowing. With that in mind we beseech thee to pursue thyself as the ultimate benevolence. Teach us Father to understand that the highest request we can ask of thee is that that thou would be jealous for thy name.
Help us also though, to see your abnegating selflessness as we find each person of the Trinity pursuing the glory of the other. Vouchsafe to us the ability to see the glorious self-centeredness of Jehovah God – the one who can pursue nothing higher than Himself – and the ability to see the glorious selflessness of Triune Jehovah God who delights in the emptying of Himself for each person of the Trinity.
As we come before you this morning we beg of thee again to, “in wrath, remember mercy.” Our sins testify against us and we acknowledge that were we absent of Christ we would deserve nothing but thy just and necessary wrath. We acknowledge that even our most noble actions are disreputable before thy Holy face and can only be found acceptable before you as they are imputed with the righteousness of our Elder Brother – The Lord Christ.
Yet, Father, you have adopted us for the sake of Christ and in the boldness that comes with being counted a Family member we come unto thee begging for Reformation and awakening. We acknowledge that we do not deserve thy tender mercies that would awaken us to thy opposition that we might be given the beauty of repentance, yet still we do ask for ourselves and all thy Elect that you might be pleased to grant us thy favor to think thy thoughts after thee.
Deliver thy Church, we beg of thee, from the haze that has settled upon it. Restore again, unto the Lecterns of thy Seminaries as well as the Holy Desks of thy Churches men who have walked with thee through the pages of Holy Writ. Grant us the boon of having men speak thy word to us who have stood in thy presence long enough to absorb the magnificence of thy being and the splendor of thy Holiness. With all that we have we ask that thou would remember thy promise to thy Lord Christ to give Him a people whose number would be as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore. Leave thy Church not in the disrepair in which we currently find ourselves. Thy judgments against us are all together just and yet for thy great name’s sake we implore you to send winds of refreshing. Let them blow through thy Church first.
And then, if we may be so bold to pursue our desires in you, we beg of thee that you would restore the family in our Nation. Do a work, by thy Spirit, where the hearts of the Father’s are turned back to the Children. Give Christian Husbands and Wives wisdom in your truths and then grant them the ability to pass on that wisdom to their children. Deliver from the madness of our current cultural teaching models and raise up again, we ask of thee, a generation of Fathers and Mothers who know, as a result of walking in your ways, what it means to keep their covenant seed.
We are shipwrecked without thy returning favor O Magnificent God. We are so dissolute and undone that we have little idea of how desolate and undone we have become. There is so much to ask and so we simply ask For thy glory’s sake, grant us Reformation." - Rev. Bret McAtee.
