Is angry prayer okay?

It's the question from Jake, listener, and Western Australia.

Pastor John, hello, and thank you for taking my question.

Is angry prayer okay?

That's my question.

To clear my head, I often ride my bike around a local lake.

Each lap is about six kilometers or four miles, and I have circled a lake for many years.

As I ride, I begin to speak to God.

My mouth becomes a spillway.

I lose a sense of myself and zone out and speak to him with virtually no self-awareness.

In those experiences, there have been two distinct times I've spoken to God in a very firm

way.

But here's the thing.

Both of those times he answered by prayer within hours.

So it makes me wonder, does God actually desire that we be engaged with a blunt, no

nonsense, self-unaware, truthful attitude when it comes to praying to him?

Pastor John, what would you say to Jake?

I remember reading the biography of Mary Schleser years ago, a Scottish missionary to Africa

in the 19th century, and one of the sentences that I never forgot, and I just went and

took it off the shelf here a little while ago, to make sure that I got it right in my memory

was this.

She said to her supporters in a letter, pray for us, pray in a business-like fashion, earnestly,

...