Pray Selfish Prayers

Erik preached on James’ guidance regarding prayer from Chapter 4: “You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” His sermon made the case that if we really have faith in God’s grace and power, we shouldn’t be afraid to pray selfish prayers. It took inspiration from his quote by Richard Foster’s book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home:

“we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives-altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure. But what I have come to see is that God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture. We do not have to be bright, or pure, or filled with faith, or anything. That is what grace means, and not only are we saved by grace, we live by it as well. And we pray by it.”