About Prayer!

I've been going to a corporate prayer meeting for our community and the four corners region (the Colorado plateau - ask me sometime) on Mondays. Its an intercessory group...thats what its called. I've always had a problem with prayer - especially intercessory prayer. I have no problem giving thanks or glory to the LORD - and I can cry out Laments just as well as David or Jeremiah. But intercedeing and then ending the prayer with "Thy Will Be Done"...of course His will will be done - right? So why pray??? I've asked that one lots of times. Then again - in my heart of hearts I know full well the answer, so I'm just being argumentative.
For this particular post, I am digging deep into my personal archives. You won't find this on my blog. It's from one of my 30+ prayer journals. Something I wrote as we were preparing to do a seminar on the occult and spiritual warfare. We were at a time and place in our faith journey where people were seeing demons behind every bush. We actually heard an evangelist pray against the demon of baldness. I came up with these three questions concerning prayer.
When someone asks you for prayer, or when you find yourself in need of prayer, you need to ask these three questions concerning the crisis you are going to pray about.
1. Is this crisis a result of sin in your life? All sin, even the ones we repent of, carry with them consequences. Sometimes crisis is a result of sin, and we need to confess - repent - and accept the consequences. The Lord disciplines those He loves. Sometimes the crisis is a result of sin committed by someone else. In those cases we need to be sure that we have forgiven the offender, because unforgiveness in itself is a sin, and will, according to Scripture, block the blessings of the LORD.
2. Is this crisis directly from God to teach us or protect us? I used to argue with people who claimed nothing bad could come from God. That leads us to question just what is "bad"? I learned this lesson the first time I had to take my little baby for a shot. Here I was, the one person in the world that my 6 week old baby trusted the most in the world, and I was handing him over to a stranger who was going to stick a needle into his little leg. It was for his own good, but I couldn't explain it to him. It hurt and he cried. I couldn't explain to him the pain was only going to last for a moment. It seemed much longer than a moment to him. But maybe this crisis is a refiners fire, a pruning of the dead branches. I'm not sure how we can be sure if it is or not, but its something we need to consider.
3. If is isn't a result of sin, or a lesson from the LORD than could it actually be an attack from the enemy. Sometimes it is. He isn't very nice you know. But his tricks are always the same. Lies, Fear, Accusation! We can pray against the enemy, we can resist his tricks, we can shine light into the dark world he tries to drag us into with his lies and accusations. But that isn't the first thing we should do everytime we have a problem, or are asked to pray for a person. We can't ignore we have an enemy, nor can we blame him for every "bad" thing or crisis we find ourselves in.
One more thing - from my wise son
One time I was in a real desperate, selfpity, lamentation type of mood and praying LORD, where are you and when are you going to take care of this problem. I probably got into the LORD you are being mean...Lord do something (there are a lot of psalms like that so if David can do it, I can do it) but then my son said - Mom, you are asking God for cookies and He is in the middle of cooking dinner.
Wait upon the LORD and see that He is Good!
Be still and know that He is God.