Our wants can easily be justified as needs. At the same time we can look at people who accumulate things and think how good they have it. Even wondering sometimes why they have it so good and we have to struggle so much. The up and coming generation certainly is marked by an attitude of entitlement as a general characteristic when it comes to work and the workplace. Entitlement however is not an exclusive domain held by those growing into adulthood. It is easy for all of us to fall into the trap of entitlement. It is easy for us to simply think more highly of ourselves then we ought to think. Greed and selfishness creep into all of our lives. People do not normally lay down their lives for each other. To the contrary we usually find it easy to demand more from others. We have an uncanny ability to mistake greed for need. We live in a society which is preoccupied with justifying feeling satisfied and safe. We are encouraged on every side to be preoccupied with our own well being. In this kind of environment we can become consumed with ourselves. We can find ourselves defining what is good by what is good for us. Unfortunately this mentality and focus is often a huge influence in our prayers.
I believe God hears a lot of grossly selfish requests in our prayers. Given the amazing extent of God’s ongoing provision of our needs we must appear to God as an extremely ungrateful people in general. God gives to us an amazing amount of things in His grace and yet we seem to have no trouble coming to God with more “needs”. But we really do have needs and God in His word encourages us to bring our needs to Him. Our intention today is to look at this area of need and consider how the Bible calls us to make our requests to God.
