TEXT: JAMES 4:3
''Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts''
To make prayer with no any other aims in view than our fancies, lusts and pleasures, is to put a wrong on our prayers. Prayer done chiefly for our happiness and nothing more, is done wrongly in the sight of God, and would therefore have no good returns from Him. In every act of prayer, God looks out for His honour and glory: He would not please man's lusts and fancies; His glory is more in His eyes than creatures' happiness; He gives us our requests, if His glory would be seen thereby. Man would be happy and swim in pleasure; he would to have heaven on earth; rules and oppresses his fellow man and be known as the favoured one; but in all of these, he eyes not the honour and glory of God but his own pleasure: therefore, God writes his prayer down as one done wrongly and amiss. To feed a man's lusts, God would have no part. So, as ever we would be people whose prayers move heaven, we need labour to be folks who target God's glory and honour in all we do and say. Our happiness and pleasures must be made subservient or subordinate to God's will in every of our petitions before God. On what a man will consume God's blessings, determines whether God would bless him or not; if on the glory of God's kingdom and the good of men, God doubtlessly opens to him the flood gate of heaven. We might safely hold that Hannah's request for the fruit of the womb was turned down for many years for want of proper motive: but when God's glory was eyed, answer came for her. See her holy sentiment in prayer: '...Hannah vowed a vow, and said, O LORD of hosts, if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thine handmaid, and remember me, and not forget thine handmaid, but wilt give unto thine handmaid a man child, then I will give him unto the LORD all the days of his life, and there shall no razor come upon his head.' Brothers, we fight our own prayers when the motive thereof is not for God's glory. God would not execute man-conceived project with heavenly bounty.