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Thoughts and prayers, guys. Thoughts and prayers. Hey, people tell me all the time, I'll pray for you. What does that mean? Is it worth anything? Why do we even do it? Or is it just some platitude that we stick to when we don't know what else to say? Hey everybody, Josh here. I'm back this week with another video. This week we are talking about prayer. What is it? Why is it important? Why should we do it? And so before I jump into those things, I want to talk about two different types of prayer that exist. I found that I kind of have two specific types of ways that I pray in my own life. The first one is petitioning where I'm asking the Lord like to directly intervene with things that are going on in my situation. When Angie and I were trying to get pregnant, right, this is something that I prayed about a lot that the Lord would allow for that to happen. This is what's called the petitioning prayer or where you're asking God for something or for someone specifically. And the second type is more of a relational prayer. I've noticed that when I am going to the Lord more in like my devotional time, I find myself kind of just setting up some time for us to hang out, right, where I clear a block of my schedule where I say, hey God, I just want to be here with you during this time. If you have something that you want to impress upon my heart, will you do so? And I just try and leave some room. Sometimes I have some worship music on. Sometimes I'm just kind of sitting in silence and it can kind of vary. And the Lord will often kind of speak to me through like an image or a word or a Bible verse and I kind of meditate on that through the day or I start to pray for someone, you know, when I feel like I'm getting a prompting for them or whatever it is. And so these two types of prayers are extremely important and you shouldn't have one over the other. The biggest thing that I've heard when people tell me about the areas of their life that they're struggling with as it pertains to prayer is that they usually find themselves just asking God for stuff and then whenever those things happen, they kind of go away and wait till the next crisis happens. And kind of the analogy I like to use is the idea of treating God like a vending machine where you just go when you need something and then you just ignore that vending machine for the rest of the time. And so what happens is the more time you spend in relational prayer, I found, the easier it becomes to be to flow into petitioning prayer because the more I'm just trying to set aside time to commune and connect with Jesus, the more I'm realizing that Jesus already knows the needs and desires of my heart and so it becomes easier to talk about those things. And so now that we kind of have those things lined out, it's important to ask the questions why. Why do we do it? Does it work? Can things actually change? And I do firmly believe that prayer can help change circumstances. There's no doubt about that. So the two big reasons of why I pray. First one is that Jesus did. Jesus is all through the Gospels spending time with God the Father. It's relational time and it's also petitioning time. Jesus asks God if there was any way for him to not have to die on the cross that the Lord would take that cup from him, he says. And of course, obviously, that's not what ends up happening, but Jesus is still asking and that's such an important example for me because I realized if Jesus needs to spend time with God the Father and Jesus is the Son of God, then how much more do I, like just a regular human being, need to connect with God the Father? And the second time or the second reason rather is Paul says, hey, in everything you ask him by prayer and supplication. So it's not like I only can pray to God for big things or like when it's like a crisis like cancer or financial things or whatever. If it's important to me, it's important to God the Father and that's such a critical detail not to miss because it means that God wants to be intricately involved in every detail of my life just as much as he wants to be intricately involved in every detail of your life. So it's kind of funny, right, if I was a friend of yours and if you knew me personally, right, or if you're watching this video and I only came to you when I had a problem, you would look at me and kind of go, I don't know if that's the kind of friendship that I want. And so I find that when I'm not involved in God with the intricate details of my life, I tend to treat God that way. I kind of come to him only when I need a problem and that doesn't feel like that's a very good relationship, right. It feels kind of like a using relationship and that's not what the way our relationship with the Lord is supposed to be like. So we pray these things because God does, because Jesus prayed and that's a pretty important example to follow and Paul talks about in Philippians about being anxious about nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication you make your requests known to God. That's big and little things God cares about them. So I hope that this video helps you feel a little bit encouraged if your prayer life is kind of struggling. If you have any questions or you want to connect, please feel free to reach out to me on Instagram. You can DM me at Joshua underscore Carmen. Feel free to share this video with someone that you think needs some encouragement in their prayer life. Thanks so much and have a great week.