Tithing is not just financial. We should also be giving God the first and our best of our time. Velocity will be opening its doors from 6:30 am to 7:30 am this week for us to pray and seek God with the first and best of our time.

Some of us have a hard time praying. We don't pray for specifics, we just throw up an "everything" prayer or we may not know what to say. Satan loves it when we think prayer is difficult or confusing. Even the disciples asked Jesus how they should pray. (Luke 11:1)

In Matthew 6:5-13, Jesus shares specific instructions on how to pray the Lord's Prayer. Most of us have heard it, others can recite from memory. The familiarity can sometimes be dangerous and the Lord's Prayer loses value. How do you counteract that familiarity and not just recite the Lord's Prayer by memory?

You have to "pray it forward" in three ways.

1) Make your prayer personal.
Because of the work of Jesus, we are adopted into the Lord's family where we can call him "Father". No longer is God a distant figure who only appears to select people, but he is familiar as a father.

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2) Make your prayers powerful.
We pray for the powerful will of the Lord, and therefore we must know his will by reading his word. We pray to make things "on earth as it is in heaven".

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3) Make your prayers practical.
Prayers are not just thoughts from the theological ether. Prayer does not tell God anything He doesn't already know, but prayer aligns us to God. The practical things we should be praying for are:
a) provision - Lord, give us our "daily bread". Lord, give me the things I need to make it through the day.
b) purification - forgive others as we forgive them. Don't replay the sin, remove it and move forward.
c) protection - Deliver us from evil. Rest in his confidence, seek his guidance, wisdom, and protection.

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