My Prayer Comes Before You

• Summary

  Believers can come to God in prayer with confidence, knowing He always hears—even when His presence feels distant. The Psalms show a model of honest, daily prayer, where both joy and struggle are brought before God. These simple rhythms of devotion, especially in the morning, anchor the heart in trust. Prayer isn’t about informing God of our needs—He already knows—but about forming our dependence on Him. Through honest conversation with God, we learn to walk with Him in every season, receiving His grace, strength, and presence for the day ahead.

“But I, O Lord, cry to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you.”

— Psalm 88:13 (ESV)

A central truth of the Christian life is that we can come to God with our needs, and he will never ignore us. We can have confidence in prayer because God always hears us. Even when we can’t see it, he is listening and responding. Even when we struggle to hear his voice, the distance is not a sign of his absence. We are always called to seek God in prayer. The invitation never changes because prayer is a provision of God’s grace.

Rhythms of Grace

The psalmist sets a pattern of devotion that we can imitate, especially in seasons of weakness: simple rhythms of prayer in the morning. Offer your prayer to God. Let it rise to his ear. Don’t weary in putting your request before him.

Each morning, we come to God with our prayers. “God, I need you to work in my life today.” We tell him the things we are facing, the challenges of yesterday that we can’t overcome, the state of our hearts we are trying to discern, and the hardships of those we love around us.

The practice of prayer becomes particularly important in times of trouble. The psalmist continues in the next verse: “O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 88:14). Verses like these show us that it’s normal to feel like God is far away, and it’s acceptable to feel that reality and talk about it.

Abiding in Christ is not just about highlighting the good things. While it’s a beautiful thing to sense the comforting and peaceful presence of God in prayer, God is also Lord in our tension and struggle. He can meet us in our gratitude and praise as much as he can in our pain.

So when we pray, it’s best to lay it all out before God from the start.

God Already Knows

Maybe the best reason to start with total honesty and vulnerability is that God already knows what we need. God doesn’t need us to inform him of our condition. Jesus taught in Matthew 6:8 (ESV): “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

The purpose of putting our needs before God daily is to remind our hearts to trust in him. Abiding looks like boldly walking through each moment of the day with grace and abundance instead of fear and scarcity.

We can only find freedom through the strength God provides and the solutions he offers. God wants us to come to him in prayer so we can learn to depend on him and set aside all self-provision.

You’re invited by God to come before him today with your prayers, wherever you are at spiritually.

You can set your requests before his throne right now.

The prayer starts simple: “God, I’m here to seek you and to know you. I trust that you are listening as I present my requests. Help me through this day. I want to walk with you in your presence.”

---

Reflect & Respond

1. What are you facing today? Where are you at spiritually? Put it all before God in prayer.

2. Where are you struggling to trust God to come through? Take a moment and set aside your vision for the outcome and see that God is inviting you first to find your rest in his presence.

---

Grace Abounds Even More

“Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

— Romans 5:20-21 (ESV)

The Christian life is filled with hope because of Jesus’ victory over sin and death. Freedom is a gift from God, and it is gracious and glorious. The power of the gospel can overcome the weight of sin. Instead of being burdened by the reign of death, we have the privilege of living under the rule of Jesus. His kingdom is a realm of freedom, achieved through grace.

Paul’s argument in Romans is methodical, and he concludes chapter five by bringing together the opposing forces trying to claim our soul: sin and grace.

• Sin is the corruption and perversion of what God designed as good and holy. As much as we try to counteract sin’s influence, we get caught and follow the path to destruction and hopelessness.

• Grace is God’s gift to his people through Jesus, and it is our only path out of bondage.

Exposing The Need For God

God’s grace can be seen as an interruption to the destructive path of sin to offer a new way of freedom, but sin must be exposed before it can be dealt with. Paul explains that God’s law was designed to draw the line between what was right and what was wrong, but paradoxically, the law that showed humanity how to be holy only exposed how unholy we were.

Paul says it “came in to increase trespass.” Why would God do something that made sin increase? It seems like the law only makes a bad situation worse, but condemnation is not the end of God’s story for his people.

The truth is that we can grasp the idea of holiness, write out every standard, even convince ourselves that we are doing a good job at being a good person, but true holiness will always be out of reach. God gives the law to show us how good he is and how guilty we are of rejecting him. The point of the law was not to prescribe behavior but to compel repentance, and God’s response to repentance is grace.

We repent because we recognize that we are broken and separated from God. The pattern of Adam is repeated in every generation as all people live in sin and disobey God. Despite the good intentions of the most devout followers of God, only Jesus could break the curse and start the revolution of grace.

Grace Is Better

Grace is not a neutralization for sin that gets the record cleared. It is not a payback plan, it’s a door. Grace is the narrow passage through the condemnation of the law into a life of freedom. And it is only accomplished through Jesus, the gift of grace.

Maybe you expect the Christian life to be a “get what you pay for” situation, but God is too abundant in life to ration grace.

Jesus offered his very self, broken and poured out for the world's sins. The cost was unmistakably higher than any of us could imagine, but Jesus paid it, and in his victory, he offers grace to all who believe in him. The only way you can be holy is if God redeems you, and the only way you can be redeemed is through Jesus.

When you get into God’s family, you discover that his power and holiness abound even more than the compounding nature of sin and death, because God didn’t just cancel sin; he brought life! Maybe you expect the Christian life to be a “get what you pay for” situation, but God is too abundant in life to ration grace.

Respond: Only Through Jesus

Have you seen the increasingly destructive nature of sin at work in the world, your community, and your life? God’s grace is the only hope. Hope starts when we stop trying to grapple with sin and death alone and we come to God in humility, saying, “God, I need you. You are my only hope.”

Suddenly, oppression breaks at the revelation of Jesus. Grace is glorious, not because it fights back against sin, but because it completely disarms death and starts a celebration of freedom.

Recipients of grace don’t wave receipts of self-righteousness to gain admission to God’s kingdom. They party in the throne room with a ticket of grace that says, “Jesus delivered me!”

---

Reflect & Respond

1. Are you trying to be holy and live a good life through your own strength? Are you ready to drop the act and receive the fullness of God’s grace in Jesus?

2. Ask God to soften your heart, give you a hunger for your presence, and make you excited again about freedom.

---

Getting Real With Our Debt and Increasing In Love

“‘A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?’ Simon answered, ‘The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.’ And he said to him, ‘You have judged rightly.’”

— Luke 7:41-43 (ESV)

The goal of the Christian life is to be so humble that we become increasingly aware of how great a debt we’ve been forgiven. To be free is to be constantly in awe at how much Christ has done for us… and to be increasing in love.

When the topic of God’s love comes up in church, the tone is usually focused on the greatness of God’s love. The Bible is clear that God’s love is completely unconditional and God-initiated (1 John 4:19). So it is interesting that in Luke 7, Jesus talks about different measures of love.

Jesus does not speak in riddles when he says that those who are forgiven more will love more.

Consider that as we contemplate the unending, unchanging, and unconditional love of God, we are only confronted with how temporary, fickle, and conditional our love is. Jesus is showing us in Luke 7 that the only way to increase in love is to increase in humility.

Luckily for the man with the extremely high debt, the grace shown to him was enough to shock him into gratitude. His appreciation for the act of forgiveness made love almost impossible to ignore.

Yet the man with the “smaller” debt was not much better off; he still had a debt to pay and was still the recipient of grace. Yet in the context of the story, Jesus seems to be implying that the man with the smaller debt had forgotten his burden by becoming distracted by someone else’s crisis.

Jesus told the story to flip the cultural narrative in a scandalous encounter at the house of Simon the Pharisee:

One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and reclined at table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, 'If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.' And Jesus answering said to him, 'Simon, I have something to say to you.' And he answered, 'Say it, Teacher.'

Luke 7:36-40 (ESV)

Simon quickly judged the woman, but in doing so, he downplayed his own sinfulness. Everyone could see that the woman was out of place, least of all Jesus. But Jesus was willing to extend forgiveness and recieve worship from the woman, while the religious and well-established positioned themselves toward Jesus socially and politically.

When Jesus cuts back with a story of forgiveness and love, he is telling Simon that while the woman may be more openly sinful, no one in the room was debt-free.

The sting in Jesus’s short parable was the accusation that Simon had a love-deprived heart.

Jesus was not pointing out that the woman had a greater debt to pay. He was showing Simon that the woman knew her debt was great, and that the rest of those gathered were blind to their need for Jesus.

The woman received forgiveness, and most of all, she got love. Simon got a rebuke, but worst of all, he missed grace.

I think Simon and his guests were interested in Jesus, but they had a false view of religion. They thought that greatness was about having no debts, so they saw the woman and judged her. Jesus said that greatness is about getting real with our need for God, and putting all our debts—every last penny—at his feet.

---

Reflect

1. Who are you in the story? Challenge yourself to let the Holy Spirit show you where you’re forgetting your debts and missing out on love.

2. Do you trust that Jesus is ready to show you grace? Take some time to pour out worship in your own way. Come to the feet of Jesus in humility and trust.

---

Waiting On God

“The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.”

— Lamentations 3:25 (ESV)

Waiting Is Hard

When my family moved back to Kankakee in 2022 from our haitus to Ohio, it seemed like all we were doing was waiting. We had reasons to move back, but we moved on what was basically blind faith. God had given us a runway of about two months to have a place to stay, an exciting opportunity, and a few amazing friends, but otherwise, we had no idea what would come next.

Waiting is hard, but it’s even harder when the odds start to stack up against you. It gets challenging to hold onto the promises of God when the realities of life seem to be getting in the way of what you need most.

Yet God knows the difficulty and complexity of every challenging situation we face. Waiting is only an invitation from God becasue life consists of starts and stops, wins and losses, progress and setbacks. Lamentations 3:25 is a comforting verse about trusting God, but it’s tucked in the middle of prayers of lament. Worry, frustration, and uncertainty surround the promise to wait on the Lord.

The same is true of other passages about waiting on God. Psalm 37 is one of my favorite psalms because of all the amazing promises of God’s faithfulness tucked within, but the premise of the psalm is: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers!” (Psalm 37:1).

At first, it might seem discouraging that so many of the sweetest promises in God’s word are really cries of blind faith amid difficult circumstances. Do we have to suffer in order to understand hope?

In some ways, the answer is yes. God forms his character in us through suffering—both in understanding the love and heart of Jesus and in refining the sinfulness within us. That’s one of the main reasons that James tells us to be joyful when we face trials (James 1:2-4). But I think something else is on display in these lament/hope companion passages.

A Clear Invitation

God doesn’t deny the reality of trouble. He doesn’t leave out the fact that humans can’t see into the future, struggle to give up control, and worry all the time. Instead, the word of God gives space for the honest place of human hearts. And in that uncertainty comes the clear invitation to wait on the Lord.

One of the most well-known verses about waiting is Isaiah 40:31 (ESV), which says: “But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.” Have you ever experienced that?

Isaiah is showing us that waiting is not just about pausing. It’s about resetting the source of our hope and strength. That’s why Lamentations says, “The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.” It’s not that God is only good to people who seek him, but that when we wait and seek the Lord, we discover and step into God’s goodness.

As much as I hate the waiting, I can hardly think of a place where I’ve experienced more of God’s divine strength and goodness. Maybe you have had the same experience. Maybe you are at a point in your life where you can either keep pressing on in your own strength or you can stop and rest in God. You’re invited today to receive the goodness and strength of God simply by waiting on him and putting your trust in his presence and plans for your life.

---

Reflect

1. What keeps you from waiting on the Lord? How could you flip that barrier into an opportunity for God’s grace?

2. What areas of your life do you need God to move in? Get specific and bring those things to God. Spend a moment waiting on him, then go through your day looking for his strength and trusting him with the outcomes.

---

Keep Praying

“And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.”

— Luke 18:1 (ESV)

• Read Luke 18:1-8 ESV

  And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

A Parable About Persistence

In Luke 18:1-8, Jesus tells the disciples a parable about a widow who found justice through persistence. Although the judge seemed unwilling to help her, he relented because she simply would not stop. Jesus doesn’t always explain his parables in the New Testament, but here he tells us outright that the story's purpose was to motivate the disciples to pray and not lose heart.

In matters of justice and deliverance, persistence is key. We do not know when the dam will break or when the door will open, we only know how to pray and how to seek.

It reminds me of what Jesus said in Matthew 7 and Luke 11. He told his listeners to ask, seek, and knock—to persist in leaning into the kingdom of God and reaching out for answers. It came with a promise: “For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:8 ESV).

There’s no promise that God will give us whatever we want, but that doesn’t stop Jesus from extending the invitation. If we only fixate on the outcomes of asking, seeking, and knocking, we might miss that Jesus is first inviting us to a posture of anticipation. God is a giving God, so positioning our hearts in a place of asking with expectation helps us to align with his will.

The widow in Jesus’s parable faced a judge who “neither feared God nor respected man” (Luke 18:2). She needed justice, but arguments, reason, and evidence were not on her side. Jesus elevated the persistent widow because her behavior modeled something Jesus wanted his disciples to get: those who stand in the truth have the freedom to be persistent.

One of the enemy’s main attacks against prayer is discouragement and hopelessness. Jesus teaches us that no opposition should keep us from pressing into the truth. We may have a vision in our minds for how God will answer us, but God’s answer is often better and more creative than ours. When we live asking and expecting, we have eyes to notice and celebrate all the ways God is responding.

---

Reflect

1. What holds you back from prayer? Where have you allowed discouragement and resistance to keep you from seeking God?

2. Take a moment and pray for something you stopped praying for, pushing past the voice of opposition.

God Was Kind To You

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”

— Ephesians 2:4-7 ESV

Desperately Separated

The Christian life can easily move from a place of spiritual desperation to casual maintenance. Routine engagement with church, Christian content, and devotions like this one can leave the impression that Christianity only exists to benefit the life of the Christian. After all, the Bible is filled with life-giving insights and inspiring stories. It’s fairly easy to extract meaningful metaphors and tips from the Bible stories. But the Bible is more than a story about moral idealism.

That frame of mind embraces a message that, yes, sometimes humans mess up, but the truths packed into the Bible are capable of helping steer Christians in the right direction. If we start seeing the purpose of the Bible and spiritual disciplines as only adding to our lives, we’ve missed the starting point of the gospel.

The message of the Bible is that people didn’t just fall back from freedom, they fell away completely. The starting place for engaging with God is a place of desperate separation. Maybe you sing Phil Whickam’s “Living Hope” at your church. It starts with this line:

How great the chasm that lay between us
How high the mountain I could not climb

The song lays out a theology of hopeless desperation before God by confessing that even if we wanted to get back to God (which we often in our sin don’t even want), the distance to cross is too great. This is not exactly an uplifting start for a song talking about a God that is supposed to be hope made alive to people. But hope shines brightest in the darkness.

Entering Into The Gospel Story

Humanity’s standing before God is bleak. We enter into the story of the gospel as offenders. The ones who, despite being made in God’s image, live like we want God to die. To live in sin is to pronounce that God’s truth is detestable to us. That’s the natural inclination of the flesh—it wages war on the truth of God’s word.

But when God enters the gospel story, he does so by his own will in grace and mercy. That’s why Paul can say that Jesus has been kind to us. He offers us something that we don’t deserve.

Switching Perspectives

There is a time to reflect on Bible stories for moral insight, but that approach to the gospel story is an incomplete picture of what God is actually saying to us. If we are only looking for a nugget of truth to apply to our lives, we will probably miss it completely.

Approaching Christianity as a consumer of spiritual goods puts us in the seat of authority. We make the decisions, plan our spiritual growth, and get all the credit for each milestone. Have you ever met someone who is blatantly self-righteous? Anyone with all the receipts for their spiritual growth is probably growing into something other than Christ.

Christian faith can only be approached from a place of utter humility. It proclaims that the only thing we bring to the table is a dead heart but what we get in return is an invitation to everlasting life.

That’s because God, in his love, was kind to you.

---

Reflect

1. Do you see yourself in charge of your spiritual journey? Where are you holding tightly to your faith and missing out on God’s grace?

2. Take a moment to meditate on the kindness of God. Open your Bible to Ephesians 2 and respond to a God that reaches out to you.

Pray

Jesus, thank you for showing me your kindness by reaching out to me when I had nothing to bring to you but a dead heart. Help me see your gospel story as an invitation of grace. I confess that it’s only because of your love and mercy that I get to respond to your truth. So form in me what I can’t form in myself. Work in me what I can’t accomplish in my own strength. Create in me a new heart.

Approaching Grace

“Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

— Hebrews 4:14-16 ESV

The Way Back to Grace

Faith can start with an explosion of energy and passion, or it can take the path of slow heart transformation. Working through the complexities of trusting in God is no simple task—much less persisting in faith throughout all the blessings and hardships of life.

Blessings bring opportunities for self-dependence. That is the kind of subtle erosion of trust where God slowly fades into the background, and material hopes move to the forefront. It’s a simple pattern of replacement where, piece by piece, the places we used to rely on God (or even look to him, for that matter) get filled up with anything else that captivates our attention.

Hardships bring opportunities to reject God. After all, it’s hard to think that God is good when surrounded by pain and injustice. The promises of God’s faithfulness can seem dim and distant from the lowest of lows.

Both places can lead back to vivid recognition of God’s grace.

Whether sinking from freedom into hardship or drifting from contentment to self-sufficiency, the way back to grace is through Jesus, the High Priest.

Jesus, The High Priest

All priests exist to minister to God’s people and to intercede on their behalf, but Jesus does it best. His ministry as High Priest surpasses every other human priest, even the greatest ones recorded in the Bible.

Jesus is like the priests throughout the Bible, but he is far greater.

• His priestly line is not from earthly families. Because he is God’s son, his right to the role of high priest is based on his nature.

• His sacrifice is not temporary. Jesus doesn’t offer sacrifices of animals and offerings from the Old Covenant. He offers himself as the perfect offering for sin and ushers in the New Covenant.

• His ministry is never to be passed on to another. Jesus is raised from the dead, lives forever, and ministers before the throne of God even now.

It might be tempting to see Jesus in comparison to the biblical description of Israel’s worship, but it’s better to see the worship described in the Bible as an imitation or shadow of the ministry of Jesus.

This is great news for us today because it means in Jesus we are privileged to bypass any barrier to God. We get to access God through God.

Application: The Posture of Grace

We wander from God toward the pride of self-sufficiency or the grief of hardship when we lose sight of the throne of grace. That throne is the source of all mercy, forgiveness, healing, and hope. We can abide in God’s love at his throne becasue his ministry liberates us from the weight of sin.

We can take our sins and sorrows directly to the Savior. God has not only purchased our freedom. He has invited us to the seat of reconciliation and peace. If faith for you feels like a rush of excitement, don’t wait to run to the throne room. If your heart is slowly turning to the Shepherd, look again to the seat of grace.

How long has it been since you approached the throne of grace?

Grace is not meant to be a one-time transaction, so the fuel of encountering God needs to be sustained through constant engagement with his word and his presence. God knows that we need daily grace to overcome sin and live in the knowledge of God, so even the most hesitant believers are invited to experience grace again by approaching the throne of mercy. Confidence in the approach begins with a timid trust until with assurance we realize we belong to the God of grace.

---

Reflect

1. Where in your life are you allowing blessings or hardships to keep you from the throne of grace? Ask God to search your heart and open your eyes.

2. What does it look like to live close to the throne of grace? Reflect on how you can respond to Jesus as your High Priest.

Pray

Jesus, teach me how to respond to you as the High Priest. I trust you to lead me into freedom through your grace. I give you my burdens, and I lay down anything that keeps me proud. I know that I am safe in your presence and confident before your throne—not because of what I deserve, but becasue of what you have done. I open my heart for you to work in me by your Spirit.