Desperation compels us to pray with fervent, focused faith - especially when we have no one else to turn to. God honors our faith when we place it in him alone - with no back-up plan, no other recourse, no other way out. He hears and answers our desperate heart cry, because he loves to show himself strong on our behalf.

If God can bring blessing from the broken body of Jesus and glory from something that's obscene as the cross, He can bring blessing from my problems and my pain and my unanswered prayer.

If our lives are easy, and if all we ever attempt for God is what we know we can handle, how will we ever experience His omnipotence in our lives?

God knows that sometimes we lack words to express our feelings, heart-cry, thoughts. And so within the Bible he includes people's prayers as models to help our own.

Prayer is hard work. We may neglect it because we're too tired, too busy, or too distracted to put into prayer the effort required.

Don't concentrate on what you lack, concentrate on what you have. Then give all of it to Jesus for His use.

The devil resists serious, focused prayer because he's defeated by it. And so the devil will try to attack our concentration in prayer; he will try to confuse or contradict the content of our prayers; he will do his best to distract and/or divert us in prayer so that we're crippled by inconsistency.