Have you ever had a prayer that you stopped praying?
We all have those deep, personal prayers that we once lifted up regularly. These are the prayers we hold close, the ones that weigh heavily on our hearts as time passes. Maybe it's a prayer for physical healing, a new job opportunity, peace in your relationships, purity of heart, or the salvation of someone dear to you. As days turn into weeks and weeks into years, we may start to feel a growing distance between our longing for God to intervene and our willingness to keep asking.
Even though God invites us to call Him "Father," it sometimes feels like He’s preoccupied with greater concerns. While He’s out overseeing the grand story of salvation, we might wonder if our personal requests even matter. He’s spreading His glory across the globe, but here we are, in the quiet of our rooms, wrestling with worries that seem small in comparison.
But in Christ, our trials are never insignificant to Him. Our burdens are not trivial or irrelevant. His grand, global purposes do not distract Him from us. Our prayers are not secondary to His priorities because our trials and prayers are deeply connected to His greatest concern as a loving Father: His own glory.
The Ultimate Motivation for Prayer
John Piper once said, “The great ground of hope, the great motive to pray, is God’s awesome commitment to his name. The pleasure that he has in his fame is the pledge and passion of his readiness to forgive and save those who lift his banner and cast themselves on his promise and mercy.”
We are prone to doubt God’s attention to our prayers when we disconnect our personal struggles from His glory—when we fail to see that His involvement in our lives is tied to His desire to be lifted up through our circumstances. God will never cease to do good for His children, even in the smallest details, because His glory is at stake in even the smallest details. If He were to ignore our pleas, He would not only be unfaithful, but He would also be less glorious.
Our God and Father binds His tender mercy and loving care for us to His glory:
“For my name’s sake I defer my anger;for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you,that I may not cut you off.Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,for how should my name be profaned?My glory I will not give to another.”(Isaiah 48:9–11)
Earthly fathers may not speak this way, but our heavenly Father does. His love for His own name actually perfects His love for us, making Him more inclined to hear our prayers. The prophet Daniel understood this and prayed, “O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God” (Daniel 9:19). This plea, rooted in God’s glory, is both unusual and deeply encouraging.
Praying for His Name’s Sake
To persist in prayer over long periods, we need to align our hearts with the profound beauty of the first line of the Lord’s Prayer:
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”(Matthew 6:9)
What’s astonishing is not just that God is so committed to His own glory, but that He would adopt us as His children and call us His own. As 1 John 3:1 marvels, “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” In Christ, we have an intimate, unbreakable relationship with the Creator of the universe.
Jesus teaches us to call God “our Father.” These two words are loaded with hope, wonder, and security beyond our full comprehension. Yet, Jesus anchors the entire prayer in the hallowing of God’s name. How can God be a good Father and still be so focused on His own glory? Because His goodness as a Father is intricately connected to His love for His own fame.
God’s pursuit of His own glory doesn’t limit His love for us—it unleashes it. His desire for His own name to be hallowed leads Him to care for us in the most profound ways, even through the smallest details of our lives.
God Invites You to Ask Again
God invites you to ask again—for healing, for reconciliation, for salvation—because He loves to demonstrate His power, wisdom, and worth through answering our prayers. And because He loves you. His love for you means He wants you to experience more of His glory. Every prayer we pray by faith is, in essence, a request to see more of Him.
The details of our specific prayers are important, but they all carry the same underlying plea: “Please show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). God’s glory doesn’t distract Him from our needs—it drives Him toward them. His love for His own name ensures that He will love us with a fierce, fatherly love, not with indifference or impatience.
If we imagine God taking a break from His grand purposes to attend to our little needs, we might start to believe that He doesn’t have time for us, or that we’re not a priority. But if we understand that our needs are part of His grand purpose, we can be confident that He is always attentive to our prayers. He wants us to ask again, not just because He instructed us to pray, but because every time we pray, we create another opportunity for His glory to shine through.
One Thing to Seek
But is God’s glory good news for us? It is if we pray like King David:
“One thing have I asked of the Lord,that will I seek after:that I may dwell in the house of the Lordall the days of my life,to gaze upon the beauty of the Lordand to inquire in his temple.”(Psalms 27:4)
We can easily fall into routines where we ask for everything but that—for daily needs, forgiveness, protection, healing, guidance, reconciliation—without ever asking to see God’s glory. When we pray, are we truly longing to see and spread the beauty of God?
If we can say that David’s one desire is also our desire, we won’t mind that our prayers become opportunities for God’s glory to be revealed. His glory will be the delight of our souls. As we continue to pray, we’ll continue to gaze upon His beauty, and we’ll want others to gaze with us. His glory in and through us will become our greatest joy, surpassing even the specific things we ask for in prayer.
So, the next time you feel your patience and passion in prayer waning, remember what Jesus prayed for you: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). Press in and ask Him again. Your Father loves to answer your prayers with His glory. And because He loves His glory, He will love you through every circumstance and trial with more of Himself.
