Psalm 83:1-18

Crying out to the Lord in the face of distress and difficult circumstances is really the most logical course of action that we can take.  It is not that God is unaware of our plight so we need to inform Him; it is that when we cry out to God we acknowledge His sovereign control over us.  Crying out to the Lord puts us in the proper place before God.  We often seem to believe that God somehow needs our prayers in order to know something or act on something.  This is simply wrong thinking about God and wrong thinking about prayer.  God does not need anything and His omniscience as well as His omnipotence are very secure whether or not we pray.  We pray because we need to pray and because God commanded us to pray.  Praying honors God and brings great blessing to our lives because it places us humbly before the Lord.

IN PRAYER WE RECOGNIZE OUR REALITY: When we pray we often find ourselves telling God about our situation.  God does not need us to tell Him about our circumstances, He already know.  Even so, God is very pleased when we tell Him what is going on in our lives because He loves it when we talk with Him.  When one of our children participates in a sporting event, musical or dramatic presentation; we love to sit and listen to them tell us all about it even if we watched the whole thing.  This kind of prayer demonstrates our desire to be close to God and that we know of our plight before God and recognize the reality of our situation.  In this Psalm the author tells God all about the distress and danger that the nation was facing as well as how the nations were blaspheming the name of the Lord because of this reality.  This was not news to God but it is the type of praying that we should do as we strive to position ourselves before God in the way that He desires us to do.


IN PRAYER WE SUBMIT TO HIS SOLUTION: When we pray we will also spend a great deal of time telling God what we would like for Him to do about our situation.  We ask God for deliverance or to exercise judgment on those who do not fear God and cause trouble for us.  God does not need us to tell Him what to do.  Our solutions will never be better than God’s and He is not dependent upon our prayers to be able to determine His course of action.  Even though God knows the best thing to do; He still delights in our requesting that He act according to our desires.  When we pray we should do all that we can to pray according to what we believe will be the most honoring to the Lord.  We don’t always know what that is, but God does.  When we pray for Him to do something that we believe will glorify Him; we are expressing our live for Him but also demonstrating that we are ready to place ourselves in submission to whatever solution God determines will be best.  God’s solutions will always be better than anything that we can suggest so as we pray we need to place ourselves under His sovereign care.

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