When we come to God in prayer and seek Him while He may be found (Psalm 32:6), He promises to watch over us and guide us in the way we should go (verses 7-8). Prayer is the way He leads us forward and surrounds us with His unfailing love. Through prayer, we express our devotion to Him and learn to place our trust in Him.
Prayer is a privilege for us to be able to approach His throne of grace and find mercy. When we come to Him in a humble and contrite heart, He knows our spirit and whether we are sincere or not. If we truly desire to be in a right relationship with Him, He provides the way and doesn’t count our sins against us (verse 2). But He wants us to come willingly, not out of compulsion (like the mule in verse 9).
If prayer is a duty that you approach out of guilt, rather than out of gratitude for who God is and what He has done, you will find that there is no joy in it and grow weary. But if you see it as a great invitation by God to give your burdens over to Him and let Him lead you in the way you should go, then it will be a source of great encouragement and strength. That isn’t to say that all your problems will be solved and everything will be smooth sailing, but when the going gets tough you can lean more in to Jesus as He walks with you in whatever circumstances you find yourself.
David Roper writes,
Prayer, then, whatever else it may be, is not calling God’s attention to things he’s not aware of, nor is it urging him to do his duty. No, it’s a conversation in which we speak our mind and God speaks his. We talk and we listen until we get into his mind and he gets into ours.
All of which means that when we get down to praying, we don’t have to worry about what to say or how to say it. We can say whatever is in us. Though our prayers may spring from anxious fear or angry, ungodly thoughts or personal revenge, God will take those prayers into his heart and turn them into something else, and in the process he will turn us into something else…
There’s no promise [in Philippians 4:6-7] that anything or anyone is changed by our prayers except our state of mind. God’s tranquility takes the place of our anxiety; his peace transcends our panic. Prayer, thus, wrung out of us by our deepest needs, has been turned into something yet more profound. In our praying WE have been transformed.
This is God at work. This is the business of prayer.
In Quietness and Confidence: The Making of a Man of God, Ch. 26: The Business of Prayer
Let us join with Him in the business of prayer, for this is where He is at work. And wherever God is at work is the way in which we should go.
Prayers for Hope 