On the National Day of Prayer, we welcome back renewal leader, author, and pastor Daniel Henderson. He invites us into a deeper life of prayer each and everyday. We discuss his books The Deeper Life & Transforming Prayer, and learn to refocus our prayers on God’s priorities versus our own, as we review practical principles for spiritual renewal. It’s fresh insight into God-focused, worship based prayer on this latest Connecting Faith.

Pastor Daniel hones in on what Jesus said about prayer in The Sermon on the Mount:

“We’re all familiar with the Sermon on the Mount and the many topics Jesus addressed. One of them – very substantively – being the subject of prayer. As you know he was speaking to his disciples especially, and he said ‘when you pray…’ – by the way I always like to note that the pronoun there is plural…. So I have a strong view that we need to be praying together just as essentially as we pray alone. We tend to individualize it perhaps to an extreme in our western culture.

But He said ‘when you pray, don’t pray this way’, and of course He isolated two other groups. As we remember, one was the Pharisees who had the wrong motivation. Their primary motive was to be seen by men. It was a religious show, and of course that’s not what God wants us to do. And then He even said secondly, ‘don’t pray like this other group’ and those were the Gentiles who had the wrong method. And so both our motive and method have to be right, and their methodology was the belief that if they could just repeat their prayers and requests long enough that their God’s would eventually submit and give them what they want. Of course, Jesus said “your Father knows what you need even before you ask him.”

Highlight: Jesus on prayer

Renewing and refocusing your prayer life