Two weeks ago a young parishioner asked me to pray for him. His prayer request was one of the best prayers I’ve ever prayed for someone. A week later another parishioner told me he has been praying a similar thing for himself. So what is this ‘prayer of prayers’? It is ‘to WANT to want more of God’. That’s not a typo. These two parishioners have asked God to help them want to want more of him. Their prayer stems from two realisations.
The first is that God is the most wonderful, awesome and all round enjoyable person/thing in existence. There is NOTHING that gives a person more satisfaction, fulfilment or fun in life. While things like marriage, career advancement, money, holidays, clothes, sex, popularity, a big house, successful kids and the like are all good things, compared to God they are worthless trinkets. As such, we should WANT God, and more of him.
Their second realisation is they don’t currently want more of God. In their brutal honesty, they realise that as products of their culture, they want more sex, money, power, popularity, education, career, and material comforts; not more God.
Their prayer is that God will bring their heart in-line with their head. Now this is an awesome prayer at the best of times; e.g. please help my heart hate that sin my head knows I shouldn’t keep going back to. Yet these two guys have applied it to the most important aspect of life; having God as our ultimate treasure.
I pray that more of us will start praying this prayer; praying that God will so work in our hearts to make them want more of God, as opposed to simply more of his stuff.