So often, prayer is a one-sided conversation. But it doesn’t have to be that way. So, what does it mean to listen to God? The Spirit, dwelling in us, speaks to us and opens our eyes to what God is saying in Scripture. What we listen to shapes us. Let’s listen to God.

The Scripture gives us words to pray. And the Spirit uses these words to draw us deeper into God’s word. We are not just reading words, we are encountering a God who speaks.

We want to be a people who can soak up the Scriptures. As we meditate on Scripture, it’s not just about getting smarter, it’s about looking for God himself. We’re not just observing truth, we’re allowing the truth to set us free.

Don’t we find ourselves at a loss for words when it comes to prayer? Prayer exposes our weakness and our inability to know what to ask for.

After returning to his disciples from a time of prayer, Jesus finds them sleeping and says, “The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Our Christian lives are marked by weakness, but the Spirit shoulders the work of our prayers.

Prayer is an unimaginable reality that only the gospel makes possible. We don’t gain access to God through spiritual techniques and religious performance. Instead, the gospel gives courage to the ashamed. As verse 9 of Matthew 6 says, needy children can come to their Father and be with Him. How good it is that we can talk with our Father!

What do we pray? How do we pray? In Matthew 6, Jesus is with his disciples, and He says, “Pray then like this.” The Lord’s Prayer is a communal, intimate cry for God’s kingdom to fully form on earth. Nick Nye walks through each line of the Lord’s Prayer, pointing out our desperation for deliverance and our need to be with God.

Our prayer life is a place where we feel the most humbled, the most weak, and the most embarrassed. In fact, if you were to poll Christians and ask, “What’s one area in your life where you feel you need to grow?” almost across the board you’d hear the answer “prayer.” We think it’s because we’re weak that we struggle with prayer. But the reality is, every very single one of us struggles to pray because we think we’re too strong. NOTE: We apologize for the poor quality of this audio track. Normally the audio sounds much better; but our primary capturing process failed, and this is a backup.

Prayer is something most of us want to do more, but often struggle so much with. In Jesus’ sermon on the mount, he address for us some common barriers to true prayer in our life, and reveals to us the path to true prayer. He tells us to address God as our Father, who deals with us tenderly and graciously, yet is a sovereign king that rules over everything.