Jacob's Prayer

And Jacob said, O God of my father Abraham, and God of my father Isaac, the Lord which saidst unto me, Return unto thy country, and to thy kindred, and I will deal with thee: I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of the truth, which thou hast shewed unto thy servant; for with my staff I passed over this Jordan; and now I am become two bands. Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him, lest he will come and smite me, and the mother with the children. And thou saidst, I will surely do thee good, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude. Gen. 32:9-12

This is one of the great prayers of the Bible. We should not miss the fact that it is a prayer in a time of great distress - often our best prayers are not offered in times of tranquility but in times of great trial. But the thing I want us to notice about this prayer is the logic which Jacob uses: he appeals multiple times to the promise of God to him. This is the way we should pray. Know the promises of God and then pray them back to him. Appeal to God's word in your praying and know for sure that you are praying in accordance with God's will. And we know that the Bible itself promises that if we pray according to God's will, he hears us (1 Jn. 5:14-15). Let us therefore with confidence and trust imitate Jacob in his dependence upon God's word to him in his appeal to God for his deliverance.