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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.