Tina

When we praise God, we give Him the respect and honour that is naturally His. We should exalt God because it should be a natural part of our lives as we have seen all the great works He has done. It also shows others as they become aware of His greatness when they see how we exalt Him. When we exalt God, our faith is strengthened because He inhabits our praises. When we exalt God, it shows that we are bonded with Him and His presence in Heaven comes down to meet our praises on earth.

God requires that we praise Him and give Him all the honour and glory that is due His Name. When we praise God with a sincere heart, He is pleased. It should be so easy for the praise to come from our hearts and roll off our tongues because He has done so much for us. He is happy when we show genuine worship and gratitude. We humans have the ability to speak, to think, to become engaged with God in communication that is a two way system. We have a spirit within us as well. So God desires that we use these gifts to tell Him how much we love Him. When we don't bless God in our prayes, we are seeking everything for ourselves because we are selfish to give Himn the praise but we expect Him to answer all our prayers.

To have a broken heart and spirit means that we are genuinely sorry for our sins. We are also sorry that we hurt and sinned against God. Contritement is necessary for the pardon of sins because we need to have anything removed that separates our relationship with God. It is a sacrifice because we no longer offer animals but instead we offer a broken and contrite heart. It also requires humility from us. We resist a broken and contrite heart because we are proud and sometimes we are not truly repentant of our sins.

We can have a pure heart as God can wash away all the sins and create something new, so that we have a cleans sheet before us as He has separated our sins as far as the east is from the west and He doesn't remember them anymore, provided we confess our sins before Him. God God brings about a pure heart through the shed blood of His Son. We need to come boldly before God, name our sins, take responsibility for them and ask for forgiveness.

David doesn't minimise or maximise his sins because he realises exactly what he has done. He knows that God reads his thoughts anyway and that God knows what is in his heart, so he comes to God based on the exact sins to be forgiven. Authentic prayer means that we admit what we have done without blaming others or that fact that we were born in sin. If we come to God in honest prayer for pardon for our sins, we are taking full responsibility and this shows that we are maturing in our walk with Him.

Faith means that we come before a just and merciful God and when we admit our sins to Him, we already know that He is a forgiving God who won't hold our transgressions against us but will blot them out. Our faith is based on the God we know. We know God to be a forgiving and merciful God, a |God who has loving kindness in His heart. We know Him as David did. We walk closely with Him. We gain the faith to pray this prayer in confidence through the Holy Spirit who shows us our sins and urges us to confess them.

Abraham wouldn't give up asking God to save Sodom for the sake of 10 righteous people, having started asking if 50 righteous were about, would He save them. His perseverance pleased God. It is necessary to pray with perseverance because it shows our faith and it shows our passion for whatever we are praying for. Yes, I have prayed through. Sometimes I became despondent because the one thing I prayed through took over 30 years to come to pass. Sometimes I let go and didn't hold on as Abraham did. But there were times when I had intense belief, yet I was impatient. I had to confess before God because my faith was tossing about on waves (James) but He taught me a lot about trust and faith and patience.

Yes, God was pleased with Abraham's boldness because God loves to answer prayer and He saw that Abraham didn't want Sodom destroyed completely as there were righteous people. Abraham didn't bargain with God, instead he stood in the gap and interceded for the few righteous people. God delights in our prayers when He sees that we put others' needs before our own and when we don't give up praying. He sees our faith and this makes Him happy.

Abraham never forgot the awesomeness and holiness of God. He never forgot the supremacy of God and he never forgot his humility when he approached God to spare Sodom. He knew that God's great love and mercy would stand in stead when he came boldly, repeatedly before God. He learned that God honours those who pray with perseverance.

Abraham walked with God and therefore came to know Him personally, more than a lot of leaders in that time. Abraham also knew that God's character was that of a fair and righteous Judge and that God didn't want to destroy the believers for the sake of the evil doers. Therefore, he appealed to God's mercy and justice. He believed that God would honour his prayers and requests, whereas those who worshipped idols, didn't expect justice from their gods, only sacrifice and one way communication on their side.

God remains unchangeable even though He can change His mind. He changes His mind when we pray because He it will still remain within the plans He had predestined. Nothing is outside the scope of God's will, however. He doesn't want evil to come to us if we ask for anything unreasonable. So His answer would probably be "No."

If we don't believe in predestination and are not determined in our prayers, we can sometimes pray weak prayers; not understanding or believing that even though God knows the end from the beginning, He can change the course of events. If we believe that our prayers make no difference to God's response, then we must also believ e that He doesn't care about us as regards our welfare, our happiness, our everyday struggles.

We should emulate Moses' belief and confidence in God's word, by quoting His Word to Him. Go's promises are found in His Word and we need to speak to Him about them when we pray. Intercession also proves to the heathen that Go has a holy character and that His mercy and grace are consistent with His character. The logical grounds Moses uses are the facts that God had promised to bring His children to safety and that He would answer their prayers and lead and guide them every step of the way. When we pray the promises of God we are standing on His Word and quoting scripture to Him, therefore telling Him that we are in agreement with what He has spoken in it. If we know God's Word, we are praying according to His will because He doesn't lie. To be in God's will when we pray means that we pray what He wants and not what we want.

The people persuaded Aaron to build idols so they could worship them instead of worshipping God. I think they had become impatient, and wanted to worship something tangible. They forgot how God had been guiding them during the desert wanderings and how He had spoken to them through Moses and Aaron and hoe He had provided for them in regards to food, shelter and clothing. Worshipping anything or anyone other than God is blasphemy. God was righteously angry but He didn't sin. The same thing He tells us, "..don't let the sun go down on your anger." In other words, it's ok to be angry but it is a sin to not forgive someone or refuse to ask forgiveness. I think if God wanted to destroy Israel and raise up a new nation through Moses, He was justified, simply because He is God and whatever He chooses to do cannot be questioned by man. Yet, that is not what He intended in the long run because it took Moses' prayer to change God's mind.

We sometimes don't ask others for help because we may be in circumstances that inhibit or embaras our asking for help. We may have brough trouble on ourselves by excessive spending, having too many credit cards, having lost our jobs, etc. It may be that pride also features here. We don't ask God for our daily needs because we like to keep busy hoarding up enough money so that we don't ever get caught short. Sometimes we don't ask God to supply our daily needs because we feel that He knows what our needs are. But God is interested in every detail of our lives. He longs for us to come to Him and tell Him our troubles and commune with Him because He loves being with us and longs to bless us.

When we ask for God's Kingdom to come, we are asking for all His power, His grace, Hid righteousness and His love to be manifest in our lives on earth. We are also asking that He come quickly to earth again. We ask for the Father's will to be done on earth because we are His disciples and His disciples should live selfless lives, putting our praise, worship and gratitude to God before our requests are made known to Him. This prayer should make us live lives focussed more on how we ought to serve God rather than what we expect Him to do for us. It should help us become more concerned about the needs of the lost than our own needs.

Our lives should be set apart from the lives of those who live worldly ways, So we should respect God our Father by serving Him with honour and great praise and great love; hearts devoid of any unclean thing. We besmirch His Name when we use it senselessly as if it means nothing but a group of consonants and vowels put together. His Name is way above that! When we pray we should come into Gods presence with respect, acknowlegeing Him as our Father but not getting buddy buddy with Him.

When I was living on my own and earning a fairly good income, I did become engrossed in material posessions and I realised that the more I got, the more I wanted. Desire for money blinds a person's concept of reality in a sense that we lose touch with the Lord and become self engrossed and self absorbed in wanting more lucre

Jesus means it when He says we can't serve money and Him at the same time. We will always be pulled in one direction more than the other and if we focus on gaining money, we lose focus on Him Wealthy people can and do serve God and many givce generously to the work of the Lord. They have their priorities right

We can store treasures in heaven by the way we serve God, for instance fast, help others in secret and God will reward us openly. Our heavenly treasures are eternal, earthly treasures are corrupt and don't last Some people can't visualise with faith the treasures that await us in heaven, they want treasures now. That is why they feel uncomfortable with the concept of heavenly rewards

We need to plan for our tomorrows and make sure that we have enough to survive on but we must not make a god of material things such as the love of money It is an old teaching as we are taught in the old testament to serve god and only God.

Do not rely on the type of riches and money to store up for we can end up serving money as we make it our god, instead of putting the Lord first. The key verse tells us not to be greedy and to get our priorities right

We need to continually ask for forgiveness because we are not yet perfect and ANY UNCONFESSED SIN HINDERS OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE lORD. Unforgiveness blocks our relationship with the Lord because when we don't forgive 100%, we are holding onto some grudge. If we want God to forgive us 100% we must let go of our grievances toward others and not recall the things they have done to us. Unforgiveness blocks a blessing from God in that we hold onto our hurts and we can only receive when our hands are empty. So we must release the hurt we are holding, lift our empty hands toward God to receive a blessing from Him

We may not seek another's help because we may feel humiliated and proud to ask for assistance; it makes us feel dependable on the other person and we feel that they may think we can't make it on our own. We seek to be independent of God because pride and a sense of self efficiency may block our blessing we receive when He answers our prayers. Sometimes we only call out to God when we can sink no further than the gutter. We should ask God to provide our daily needs because it is scriptural first of all; ".....ye have not because ye ask not." God knows what we have need of but just like an earthly father He waits for His children to come to Him with needs. When we ask Him on a daily basis, we are reaffirming our trust and dependence on Him as well.

When we ask that the Father's Kingdom come, we are asking Him to come as He is the kingdom of heaven. We ask for the Father's will to be done on earth because we are His disciples and our prayers must focus foremost on the will of the Father in our lives and then only are we to pray for ourselves. "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God..." This prayer helps us to keep our minds focussed on Christ and not to be conformed to the world, this will display itself in our lives we live as a witness for people.