Philippians 4: 6, 7 – Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. [New International Version]

This recipe is guaranteed to work, all the time! There is no special case!

How to do it? Pray with Thanksgiving

In the previous article we saw what we should do first. Here, we see how. We present our requests by prayer and petition, and verse 6 adds with thanksgiving. Our prayers to God, in which we present our requests, should be prayers of thankfulness! For example, we should say “God I thank you because I know that you have already resolved my situation”. Here are two examples of how NOT to pray “Oh God please help me just this once, please I am desperate…” or “God, if you do this for me this time, I will…”

One reason we thank God is because He has already received and accepted our requests even before we knew we would have it. The reality is, the focus of our prayer should not just be about informing God about our challenges, because He knows them already ! Even more important, our focus should be about thanking Him, believing that He already has the desire and ability to resolve our challenges. Our prayer of thanks demonstrates our knowledge and conviction of this magnificent reality – that He already knows and wants to solve our problems!

Thanking God in our prayers in the midst of a challenge helps us set our sight on the end of result, the deliverance, rather than on the challenge itself. How wonderful!

However, there is more to God’s recipe. God also tells us WHEN we should do all this, and probably more important, He tells us WHY this recipe actually work, all the time! We discuss this in the next article.