Thursday, January 4, 2018

Day 4 of 40 Days of Prayer: Purify Your Heart

Our hearts dictate our motives in prayer - what we ask for when we pray and why we ask.  The Book of James says that one of the hindrances to answered prayer is impure motives.  James says, “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” We cannot expect to receive anything from God when we ask to receive from Him with only our own pleasure in mind.


Jesus showed us the way to pray with a pure heart.  When faced with the excruciating execution on Calvary, Jesus punctuates His prayer to the Heavenly Father with the qualification, “not my will, but your will be done.” As we continue our 40-day prayer journey, approaching our Heavenly Father about all manner of needs and situations, let us be sure to purify our hearts from the contamination of self-centeredness and temporal focus.  Let us seek to calibrate our minds to seek and obey God’s agenda, praying with all sincerity, “not my will, but Your will be done!”


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