All right. Be honest. Would it make you nervous to pray in public? 

So, you're at a gathering with family and friends and, and you're put on the spot to say a prayer in public. Would that make you nervous? Okay, for some of you you're going, "No, absolutely not." And you know what? That's awesome! That is a wonderful blessing. But for the rest of us, saying a prayer in public can kind of be nerve-racking. Why is that? It's because we don't really think we know how to pray. And one of the things that we should really study when we're looking at how to pray is the Lord's Prayer, which 'Your Time of Grace' has done a two-week series on the Lord's Prayer. I encourage you to go look it up and study that. 

But today, what I want to do today is I want to give you my trick for when I'm asked to pray on the spot. And pastors get asked fairly often. But first, I want to say that there is not one way that we should pray. I love church prayers. I love the beautiful language of church prayers. But I sometimes wonder if they give the impression that God only speaks in church language. That just like you're not nervous when you're talking to your parents, so you don't have to be nervous about the words that you're using when you're talking to God because there are no one right set of words to use. 

Okay, so what I do when I get asked to pray in public is I use an acronym. It's the pray acronym. And each letter, when you go through it, it becomes like second nature when you go through it again, and again, and again and use this pattern. So, let's say you're at, your nephew's birthday party and you're asked to say a prayer for your nephew. And so you start with P. Praise. Um. Heavenly Father, we thank you for all your blessings today. We thank you for this beautiful day, for the opportunity to get together with family, friends and for giving Billy another year of your grace. Okay, look at that. The prayer is off to a good start. Then we go to repent. Um. We're sorry that we failed you and yet we thank you for the gift of your son, through whom we have gained access to the celebration of heaven. And then we get to the easy one, the ask. So we ask you to be with us. We ask you to be with Billy and bless him. Bring him closer to you throughout this coming year. And then we close our prayer with the yield, the why. We pray it in Jesus' name, Amen. That's one way to do it. 

You know what? As you read the Bible, I always thought it would be such a neat thing to be like Abraham or Moses and have God let me in on his plan so that I could talk to him about them. But when you really think about it, hasn't God let you in on his plans in his Word? That you know who you are. You know who made you. You know about the beginning of the world, what the world is like right now, what's happening to the world. You know your purpose in life and where you're going to be. God's let you in on his plans and now he wants to talk to you, his child, about those plans. What a privilege. 

God bless you with a richer and richer prayer life. 

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