I wanted to say a few things about Mid-day Prayer. This week we used the ACTS format of prayer. ACTS stands for adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. While it’s appropriate to bring all of our needs before our Heavenly Father, this prayer time has been focused on what we call “kingdom prayer.” That’s where we especially focus on the growth of Christ’s Kingdom through the message of the Gospel.

This week our Scripture for Adoration and Thanksgiving was from Psalm 134 where it says, “Come bless the Lord all you servants of the Lord” (ESV). It’s appropriate to begin prayer focusing on the Lord instead of ourselves. This is how Jesus Christ taught his disciples to pray beginning with “Our Father.” Often in prayer we jump right to our sins to confess or our needs for which we ask God to provide. Sometimes that may be necessary as shown in Psalm 51. However, most of the time what we need is to stop and lift our eyes from ourselves to our Savior. As one pastor put it, for every one look we take at ourselves we should take ten looks at Christ. This helps with discouragements, doldrums, and naval gazing in prayer (speaking from experience!). So many times, my feelings about my own sins and life’s challenges have changed when I took the time to spend 2 minutes praising the Lord for his work of salvation.

Next, we used Psalm 51 as a prompt for confession. There King David cries out for mercy from God because of his egregious adultery and probably assault that he committed against Bathsheba. Why use this Psalm to confess our sins? Are David’s sins not far worse than ours? That’s true until we listen to the words of our Savior who said that if you even look at a woman with lust then you have already committed adultery in principle. Therefore Psalm 51 is a great help for seeing the tragedy of our own sin against God, and not just adultery. The Spirit uses this Psalm to crush our pride in order that we may empty our hands of all righteousness so that we can receive the abundant grace of God in Christ Jesus. Psalm 51 calls us all to become like David so that we may be exalted with Christ in grace.

Lastly, we read the Apostle Paul’s prayer from Ephesians 1:15-20 to help us ask the Father for what we need and want. The Good News is that as we align our wants with Scripture, we are actually asking the Father to do what he already wants to do. In Ephesians Paul prays that the Ephesians would know what is the hope to which God has called them, “what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (ESV). Scripture challenges us to ask the Lord for things beyond our own immediate needs, and even beyond the physical needs of those we love. God’s Word invites us to pray that he would be powerfully at work in the midst of our sickness, job loss, depression, and even our sins. In this way, our prayers become powerful weapons of spiritual warfare whereby the kingdom of darkness comes to an end and God’s glory spreads as the waters cover the sea.