I believe every human being’s deepest need is for unconditional love, but because this need is so central to our being, we have a deep fear of surrendering to love. We were created before the Fall, with the built-in need to love and be loved fearlessly and without restraint. Unfortunately no descendant of Adam can claim that we will never let another person down, with the result that perfect love is impossible between human beings. That is why we are fearful of unconditional surrender to love, except when God is the other partner in this love relationship. God cannot fail us, He will not reject us, He knows us inside out, He has forgiven all our sins and loves us unconditionally with the only perfect love we will ever know. We are so used to receiving what we deserve that grace, mercy and undeserved favour are foreign to our thinking and yet when we want to relate to God we have to think in terms of grace. It is by grace and grace alone that we have the confidence of being accepted by God. If it had not been for the sacrificial blood of Jesus Christ, God would have to reject us because of our sinful nature. But if it had not been for God's love for us, Jesus would not have paid the price for our redemption. The Message Bible describes this in 1 John 4 : 10 - "This is the kind of love we are talking about not that we once upon a time loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as a sacrifice to
clear away our sins and the damage they've done to our relationship with God." Jesus died for our sins so that the relationship between man and God could be restored. God loves us so much that He, through Christ, not only released us from our sins, but also from the negative results of our sins in our relationship with Him. Where does prayer fit into this love relationship? Prayer is the relationship. Without prayer there is no relationship. Prayer is the communication channel, actually prayer is more than communication, it is communion. Prayer is the intimate conversation between man and God. Prayer is the coming together of Creator and creation in a relationship where there can be absolute trust and understanding. Where the deepest needs and desires can be shared. Where we can be completely honest about our failures because God knows us and loves us in spite of all our faults. God desires a love relationship with us. He created us for that purpose. But we struggle to comprehend that God desires us to interact with Him, therefore we often miss the most important aspect of prayer. We think prayer is only bringing our needs and problems to God, but prayer is relating in love to the One who accepts us unconditionally. Prayer is supposed to be so intimate...it should be our greatest privilege and experience. We so often express the desire to have a more intimate relationship with God and yet we are often afraid for too much intimacy. We instinctively know that
when we come close to a Holy God all our sinfulness will be exposed. This feeling of unworthiness causes us to run away from God, but we should rather run to Him with our sins and our feelings of unworthiness. God made provision for this too. In 1 John 1 verse 8 and 9 it is written: "If we claim that we're free of sin, we're only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins - make a clean breast of them - He won't let us down; He'll be true to Himself. He'll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing." Every time we ask forgiveness, our relationship with Him becomes free and new again. God says that He will not remember our sins after we asked forgiveness. God wants our trust, our love and our communion with Him. Our Heavenly Father is watching and waiting for us as the father of the prodigal son was watching and waiting. He longs for us to come into His presence with boldness because He gave His only Son to restore this love relationship with us. We have been redeemed by grace and we can only accept this gift by faith. In Romans 5: 1-2 we read in the Message: "By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us - set us right with Him, make us fit for Him - we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. And that's not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that He has already thrown open His door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand, out in the wide open spaces of God's grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise."
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To understand prayer, we first need to understand the relationship between fallible human beings and Almighty God. It is a love relationship, originating in God's love for us and our responding love for God.