The ACTS Prayer

While looking through an old Bible I found this variation of the formulaic ACTS prayer that I had written perhaps 20 or so years ago: 

Adoration: You are the power & glory & truth, the source of life, of love, of learning and of laughter.

Confession: We confess our sins of the mind, of the body, of the flesh and ask your forgiveness for neglecting your holiness.

Thanksgiving: We thank you for giving us the grace of Jesus Christ that we might be saved by faith.

Supplication: We ask you to help us do good works out of joy we receive from your grace. Help us love one another. Thy will be done.

Seeing that old prayer formula started me thinking. Those thoughts I share with you. 

• We often spend most of our prayer time asking for something instead of worshiping God and thanking God for all he has done for us.  
• Prayer is not like putting a nickel in a gum machine, twisting a handle, and then waiting for the gum to pop out. 
• Treating God like Santa Claus cheats us out of the treasured relationship we can have with him.
• Prayer is not a numbers game. Notre Dame's foot­ball victory over Southern Methodist University has nothing to do with who has the most people praying for success. Notre Dame wins because their players are big­ger, stronger, and faster than SMU's team. (Winning coaches pray like God decides victories and they recruit like he doesn't.)
• God wants to hear our worries, concerns, frustrations. He wants to share our grief. He wants to help us. But when we pray only the supplication part our prayers turn into give me, give me, give me. 
• I believe that thy will be done is an extremely important request in every prayer.
• When we become aligned with God's will we begin to understand his answers to our requests.