Prayer is powerful.

That message is communicated in churches every week. However, so many of us hesitate to pray time and time again, myself included. But why? For me, it’s because I don’t feel like I have enough of the “right” things to say in order to formulate a “good enough” prayer. If I don’t understand what I’m trying to pray or why I’m praying it, I lean towards not saying it at all. All this does is lessen the amount of interaction we have with God and place barriers on His ability to work within us. The truth is, God is beyond our understanding.

“Great is our Lord and mighty in power;
    his understanding has no limit.” Psalm 147:5 NIV

Our prayers don’t need to make sense to us in order for God to use them for our good. Our prayers don’t need to make sense to us in order to make sense to God.

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:26-28 NIV

In the passage above we see that it doesn’t say to cease praying when we don’t know what to say, it says that it is when we don’t know what to pray for that the Spirit intercedes for us. God has a purpose for each of us, a good purpose, and in order to know what that is, we must be persistent in building a relationship with God and communicating to Him by prayer.

God will never hold back on us, He is faithful in giving us everything we need to fulfill our purpose, and always ready to listen to us when we are ready to talk to Him.

“This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” 1 John 5:14 NIV

With that I encourage you to pray and pray often. There is no one who is a better listener than God, and there is no one who is a better giver than God. Let us not be a people who wait until we think we know what to pray for before we approach His throne. God is and always will be beyond our understanding, and yet He is always willing to meet us right where we are and give us just what we need to fulfill the good purpose for which He created us.