The Why? Why exactly do we pray? The Bible is clear God is sovereign over everyone and

everything he knows our wants and our needs before we even utter a word so what's the

purpose of our prayers?

Alisterbegg has an encouraging answer for us today on Truth for Life. He's teaching from the book of

James chapter 5. We're focusing on verses 16 through 18. There is a danger then in the way in which we listen and there is an equal danger in the way in the way in which we speak.

Spirit of God works and he works through means.

And the warning here in this exhortation is that if we're going to apply this

process we need to test our motives and we need to

trust our relationships. Test the motive in speaking and trust the relationship.

You can't talk to everybody about everything.

You didn't.

Some people are like a... their mouths are like a babbling brook. They're just

waiting for further information to be fed into the stream and it's no sooner in the stream than it's gone

downstream. You can't tell things to those people. You need to look for people who

are the dead sea. All of the information flows it but it never comes out with the other end.

It's simply, it's turned to God in prayer.

Or if you like to mix analogies, you need the person who is the firewall, is the person who digs the

dirty great ditch and says the fire will not jump beyond here. If you tell it to me

together we take it to God and the matter is finished and done with and we move on.

Test your motives, choose your relationships, and trust those you choose. And finally in relationship to this it is a good

rule of thumb and I've told you this before to regard the area of

Commission as the area of commission as the area of confession.

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