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focused praying

Deuteronomy 9:25 “I fell down in the presence of Yahveh forty days and forty nights because Yahveh had threatened to exterminate you.
Deuteronomy 9:26 I prayed to Yahveh: Lord Yahveh, do not annihilate your people, your inheritance, whom you redeemed through your greatness and brought out of Egypt with a strong hand.
Deuteronomy 9:27 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Ignore this people’s stubbornness, and their wickedness and mistakes.
Deuteronomy 9:28 Or else, those in the land you brought us from will say, ‘Because Yahveh wasn’t able to bring them into the land he had promised them, and because he hated them, he brought them out to kill them in the open country.’
Deuteronomy 9:29 But they are your people, your inheritance, whom you brought out by your great power and outstretched arm.

focused praying

Twice in his prayer recorded in this text, Moses reminds God that the Israelites are his people, his inheritance. He prayed for God to remember his people of the past— the patriarchs whom he invested in, despite their shortcomings. He prayed for God to consider the outcome of his threat to exterminate the race. He reminds God that he had rescued these people for a purpose.

Not once did Moses appeal to God to spare the Israelites on the basis of their own merit. The prayers always focused on God and his acts and his will. Focused praying is not so much reminding God who we are and what we need as it is rehearsing who God is and what he wants.

Our Father in the sky, may your name be honored, and your kingdom come, and what you want be done.