Over the last two weeks we have asked and attempted to answer two questions about prayer from this passage of the Sermon on the Mount. We asked “Why do we pray?” and found that we pray because it is a command, Jesus told us to pray; we pray because it is an invitation, the Father has promised to be waiting for us in the secret place if we will choose to come and join Him there through prayer and we pray because it is a promise, when we pray God hears us, He gives us His ear, His heart and His attention. We could form a long list of reasons to pray but I can think of no greater reason than the fact that God loves us, He enjoys us and when we pray He listens to us and gives us the opportunity to listen to Him. Our second question was “Who do we pray to?” A question about the relationship of prayer far more than who our prayers are addressed to. When we pray we are children relating to our Father, we are pouring out our hearts and opening our ears to His heart, we are entrusting ourselves, not merely our needs or our desires, but ourselves to God’s love, God’s character, God’s will and God’s discipline. Because God is our Father and prayer is a gift of intimate love when we pray we can rest assured that if God has chosen to hear every prayer than He will also be faithful to answer every prayer, this doesn’t mean that He will grant our every request but that He will reveal His love, give grace and show His Fatherhood in every situation that we will bring before Him. He will never do us harm, He will never ignore our voice, He will never overlook our needs or invalidate our hearts but we can trust that He will always Father us and that when He will not fulfill our requests He will be near us as He leads in a way that is more than we could have asked, imagined or understood. The greatest promise of prayer is that God hears us, the greatest outcome of prayer is that God answers all of our prayers and the greatest reality of prayer is that it brings us close to God where we can learn that He has always desired to be close to us. Today we ask our third and final question in this series, “What are we praying for?” James 4:2 famously concludes by saying “You have not because you ask not” but then verse 3 picks up with another reason for what we have often called unanswered prayer, “You ask and you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.” Sometimes we ask for the wrong reasons and sometimes we even ask for the wrong things. Wanting what is not best for us is simply the reality of being children, providing what is best and teaching us not only how to ask but what to ask for is the disciplinary work of the Father. He doesn’t just teach us how to ask and the character of the One we are asking, He also desires to teach us what we should be asking for. It’s not enough to ask and it’s not enough to ask the right person we have to want to be sure that we are asking rightly because ultimately we must learn to make prayer vital not because it’s how we get what we want but because it connects us to the One who knows and is what we need. Today we will concentrate on the question “What are we praying for?”