I know prayer is important, and I understand I should pray, but . . . to be honest. It can seem that our motivation for prayer is results-oriented, simply to get answers.

Prayer can feel like a grocery list: “Our Father, who art in heaven . . . Gimme, gimme, gimme!”

This should not be the reason to pray.

So I began to study how and why Jesus prayed, and discovered five very motivating reasons to pray. It is to develop a good relationship.

Certainly Christ has standards, but we don’t become Christians because we receive standards. We become Christians because we receive Christ, who loves us, died for us, lives in us daily.

What I need, then, is to build my love relationship with Him. I have to learn to allow Him to embrace me, to care for me, to point out my needs to me (and how He fulfils them). I need to listen to Him, and I desperately need to talk with Him.

In Ephesians 3:14-19,

Paul prays, “that you may be able to comprehend . . .
what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge . . .”

“Know” in this passage is the same word used for the intimate closeness of a husband and wife in sexual embrace. Paul is praying that you and I will experience that kind of love with
Christ – not sexual, but intimate, deep, close, unfettered. It is so deep that Paul later says it “surpasses knowledge.”

One place we can experience this is in prayer. When we “get down and get honest” before God, we are on His turf in a unique way.  Seldom do we get closer to Him than in prayer. When we pray, we can pray to experience this love, to be bathed in it, to learn how to give it back, to learn how to let it seep into the dry cracks and crevices of our lives.

I think that the main reason for the gift of prayer is that we learn to receive, experience, and return His love in genuine relationship. Prayer is one place when God can get at us (and we think prayer is for getting at Him!) and speak to and minister to us.

That is why David prays in Psalms 18:1,

“I love you, O Lord, my strength.”