When You’ve Been Praying for Yourself More Than Others

Pablo Diaz had been praying his whole life. He was a

minister. Prayer was a job in his habit. But one day, he

looked at what he prayed about most, and it was almost all one

subject. Him. His worries. His needs. The list ran in a loop,

and the loop was pretty much all about him. The truth was,

Pablo's prayer focus had gotten narrow. What he did about it

changed something he wasn't trying to change. We'll come

back to what Pablo did, but first, welcome to Daily

Devotions for Busy Lives. I'm Bart Leger. Here's something

about me I had to look at. When I pray in front of our church on

a Sunday, the whole prayer is pretty much other people. The

person in the hospital, and that God will bless and use our time

together to honor Him. Then, I pray by myself later, and the

list gets a whole lot shorter. It's mostly me, and what I'm

trying to decide, what I'm worried about, what I've got to

do next. And I'm not always praying for others like I And I

never set out to do that.

The job interview coming up, or the decision we've been turning

over for a month. Nothing is wrong with any of that. Jesus

taught us to ask for our daily bread, and he meant our daily

bread. But here's the thing to watch for. If the whole shape of

our prayer life has become you talking to God about you,

something starts to shrink. Your field of vision gets about as

wide as your own calendar. The Book of Job ends with a scene

almost nobody thinks about or talks about. Job 42: 10. When

Job prayed for his friends, the Lord restored his fortunes. In

fact, the Lord gave him twice as much as before. Now let me back

you up two verses. 40 chapters of argument are over. His three

friends have spent all of it telling Job that his suffering

proved there was sin in his life. One of them said it was about

his dead And here's what God does with that anger. Verse

number 8. He tells those three men to go to Job and he says Job

will pray for them. God made Job's prayer on their behalf and

won't treat them as they deserve. God made Job the intercessor for

the men who had accused him. Job's prayer is the thing

standing between his accusers and God's anger and God is the

one who set it up that way. So in verse 10 says Job prayed for

his friends. Understand that God had already told him to do it.

Job was obeying an instruction. Now we have to be careful

because verse 10 often gets quoted as though intercession

were a leave-er. Pray for people and God doubles your holdings.

The text won't support that. And look how it records it. The

Hebrew in verse 10 is an expression older translations

give as God turned the captivity of Job. It's the same phrase

used for bringing exiles back home. Job had been in a kind of

captivity for 42 chapters and the hinge came at the point

where he was occupied with somebody other than himself. I'd

put it this way. Job was still ruined when he started praying

for those three men. Nothing had been restored yet. He prayed for

his accusers out of a pile of ashes. And that's where

everything turned. So here's what we can do with that. And

the second part is the one many people skip. Pick the one person

that you can pray for and start this week. Pick somebody you

haven't been praying for maybe, or somebody who's wronged you.

Then watch what it does inside you and quit watching for what

you get out of it. That second kind of watching turns

intercession back into a transaction, which puts you

right back where you started talking to God about you. So

Pablo made one deliberate change. He started praying for other

people on purpose, people other than himself. And what changed

was him. Praying for others stretched his prayer life. It

also did something he didn't expect. It put him in touch with

his own frailty, and it brought his buried stuff up to the

surface where God could deal with it. The man who'd been

praying mostly for himself ended up more known by God once he

stopped making himself the only subject. He said, "More known by

God." That's a strange result from praying about someone else,

and it's the one Job got too. The man who prayed for his

accusers is the man God called his servant four times in one

chapter. Here's today's challenge: Write down somebody's

name. Maybe somebody who's wronged you. If you can stand it.

And if that's too much this week, somebody you've never thought to

pray for. Then pray for that person by name every day for

seven days. Out loud and by yourself for one minute. Ask God

for good things for them. You know, the kind you'd want for

You're here to pray for yourself. And keep a short note of what

changes in you over the week. You're the subject of this one.

Father, you told three men who had wronged your servant to go

and let him pray for them, and you said you would accept that

prayer. Thank you that you put Job to work on somebody else

while he was still in the ashes. For everybody listening whose

prayer list has gotten down to one name, widen it this week.

Teach us to ask for good things for people who have cost us

something. In Jesus name, Amen. This podcast runs on the

generosity of listeners just like you. If Daily Devotions for

Busy Lives has encouraged you, would you consider supporting it

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Every contribution helps keeps these devotions coming every

week. You can give at

dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support . Thank you so much. And thanks

for joining me on Daily Devotions for Busy Lives.

Remember, Job prayed for the men who accused him, and he did it

before anything else in his life had been put back. Pick one name

this week and pray for them. Come back next time for more

encouragement to help you live grounded in God's truth. Until

then, God bless and have a great day.