Asking Prayers

When we pray, we tend to do a lot of asking.  We ask for the healing of a friend.  Or, we ask for help with a problem.  Sometimes we ask for guidance in making some tough decision.  And, of course, we ask for God to bless us, our family, and our church.  There is certainly nothing wrong with this kind of prayer.  It is Biblical.  We read the Word and we are told to ask and we do.  Like the ancient Word to be fruitful and multiply to which we adhere, so do we diligently practice the words about asking.   

At times I wonder about the scatter gun type of praying.  It does not really seem that the asking is for "anything" as "anything" can get to be unreasonable as well as something which seems to fly in the face of the prayer teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that tells us to pray according to "Thy will be done."  Reconciling random asking and the Word from the Sermon is not easy.   

One way to approach our asking prayers might be to ask God how it is that He wants us to ask.  Instead of asking Him to heal someone, maybe asking Him how He wants us to pray for someone in trouble is a better direction.  Or, instead of asking Him to bless our church, asking Him how it is that He would have us pray for His church would be a more appropriate way to pray.  What is being suggested is obvious.  Maybe before we start asking Him for anything, we need to ask Him how we should be praying in the different situations of our life.  As we seek to pray inside His will, we could start asking Him to enable us to see His will so that we might ask according to His heart instead of what we think someone needs from Him.