Philippians 4:6
“...but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (ESV)

In Philippians 4:6, Paul speaks of a particular kind of prayer, namely, “requests.” He then speaks of the kind of heart from which we are to make these requests. There is a right way to make requests of our Sovereign Lord and this a matter of having a right heart. Yet, to be clear, it’s not a matter of trying to figure out the right wording or formula in making our request, but rather it is out of the right heart that we are to make our request known to God. Contrast this with the fact that a bad heart leads us to make the wrong kind of request. In James 4:3 we hear, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” Cleary, an idolatrous, selfish, and greedy heart leads us to “ask wrongly.” God knows the heart. We can use all of the right words and follow the right formula and still find that we honor Him with our lips, but our hearts are far from Him (Matthew 15:8).

The good news is that God continues to teach us about prayer and here in Philippians about how we make our requests known to Him. Yes, He invites us to ask Him. Study Matthew 7:7-11. Ask… Ask… Ask… It’s His invitation, yet, He instructs us on the kind of heart we are to have when we ask. 

Allow me to point to just one word in Verse 6 - “supplication.” This word denotes the heart posture of a humble beggar. Having a right heart in prayer is having a humble heart as we approach His presence. We come needy, lowly, and desperate. Charles Spurgeon writes: “Our addresses to the throne of grace must be solemn and humble, not flippant and loud, or formal and careless.” Also, “When you are engaged in prayer, plead your strength, and you will get nothing; then plead your weakness, and you will prevail. There is no better plea with Divine love than weakness and pain; nothing can so prevail with the heart of God as for your heart to faint and swoon. The man who rises in prayer to tears and agony, and feels all the while as if he could not pray, and yet must pray - he is the man who will see the desire of his soul.” What a gracious God and King! When we enter His presence, we should immediately hear Him demand, “Silence!,” but, we discover that His throne is a throne of grace inviting us to humbly come and petition Him. 

May we plead with God in weakness, finding that we will prevail, and see the “desire of our soul”! 

“But this is the one to whom I will look:
he who is humble and contrite in spirit
and trembles at my word.”
Isaiah 66:2

- Tom