The Ground Zero Prayer

So with all that said, how to do you come to know what you should pray for and what you should not pray for?

That’s very simple. You ask God that very question. Then wait for His answer. And then weight the answer you think He has given you against the whole panorama of what He has said in the past in the scriptures. And that will give you your answer.

Now, I hope you are not thinking I am being facetious with you. It is not my intention here to state the obvious. But it is my intention to state what is so obvious that it is frequently overlooked.

If you have been praying at all in the time before you’ve read this book, you will have picked up a number of ideas about prayer, and things to pray about. But I am willing to bet that most of these ideas about prayer, and subjects for prayer, were given to you by human beings. Human beings who may be riding a bicycle, or a unicycle, or no cycle at all. Human beings who may be under the influence of either their own lusts, or deceiving spirits.

So the radical thing I am proposing here is that you create a ground zero in your prayer life in which you will have communications only with God Himself. Yes, you will be vetting these communications with your understanding of the word of God, but you will be communicating with God Himself. Everything else you pray to God for will be built on this ground-zero.

Metaprayer

To achieve this ground-zero in prayer I propose you start with a metaprayer.
What is a metaprayer? A metaprayer is a prayer about praying. If you look and listen closely, you will see that “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven” is in fact a metaprayer. It is a prayer about what the disciple will pray for. The disciple is praying that whatever he prays for will be according to the will of God.

On my part, I have learned that the foundation prayer I need to pray is the following metaprayer:

“Show me what to pray for and what to stop praying for.”

By praying this prayer I’ve found that, at a stroke, I’ve removed a good many of my own subjective, ego-driven problems from my prayer life. As far as I am able to know, I have removed my Adamic, ego-driven self from my prayers by leaving the subjects of my prayers to God’s direction.

Because of this prayer, I am not praying for a lot of people to come to the meeting because of an unconscious desire I have to have my ego stroked if I happen to be the one to get up and speak. I am not praying that the evangelistic campaign will be successful so that I will not be made to look like a fool when I have a thousand doors slammed in my face. I will not be praying that the cottage meeting will be well attended because I want to meet a likely looking member of the opposite sex.

I pray this prayer, and await the answers to it from God Himself.

And when I get the answers from God, I am surprised that besides the “spiritual” stuff He does indeed want me to pray for, I am also given the liberty of asking Him directly for the “un-spiritual” stuff I had heretofore been trying to hide behind my “airy-fairy” “spiritual” requests.

I discover on my own the overwhelming grace of God, instead of receiving it second-hand from others who may be “more spiritual then God Himself” (if you catch my drift and are not too offended by the way I have put this). This is wonderful liberty to come into.

Notice that I also ask to be told when to stop praying for something. That is my guard against the over-importunacy that can border on witchcraft and rebellion against God’s will. If some things in my prayers are contingent on something or someone else, or if I have been praying wrong after all, I am agreeing with God that He should signal me to stop when He wills it.

Within the bounds of that one single metaprayer, “Tell me what to pray for and what to stop praying for,” I have, by God’s grace, shielded my self from many dangers and made my prayer life a number times more accessible to God’s heart. In one sense, I do not pray. He uses me to pray to Himself. This is fellowship [ “something in common” ] with the Father and the Son (1 John 1:3) by the indwelling Holy Spirit.

I’ve since found that this ground-zero method of prayer of mine is not an idiosyncrasy peculiar to me. It turns out that this was also something that George Muller discovered.

http://www.unityinchrist.com/prayer/mueller3.htm

“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine-tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. When one is truly in this state, it is usually but a little way to the knowledge of what His will is.”
We’ll see the significance of George Muller in the next chapter.

But having said all that, I beg the question. How do you know your prayer has been answered?