Telling God what to do

I don’t normally just pick up the bible and choose a passage at random on which to write. But today I did. I was trying to discover how it is that God keeps using not only the big ideas but also the passing reflections of ordinary people to exalt his name. For instance: This morning my new bible just opened at Psalm 50 and beginning to read, I came rather quickly to v. 15 where God promises that if we “call on him in the day of trouble” he will “deliver us.” What a wonderful promise! We do have our troubled days and here is God saying that if we call on him ­– bring him into our time of trouble – that he will show us the way through. It is so straight-forward and easy to understand — We do X, and he does Y.  
       However, the X / Y nature of the promise reminds us that the result is provisional, that is, it depends on our meeting a certain requirement.  No calling on him, no answer. I am assuming that when scripture talks about ”calling on God” it means more than bringing it up now and then. Does it not mean coming to God in an organized way and specifying what it is that we would like him to do on our behalf? I know that prayer is personal and quite often emotional, but I believe that there are also other times when we are to lay out before him what it is that we want him to do and how we would do it if it were up to us.
     “But,” you say, “what you are suggesting sounds like stopping off at the church after we have been shopping and laying out a list of things that are spiritual rather than physical.” To some extent that may be true, but could that not be one part, not all, of a larger prayer life?  If so, it would be consistent with the view that we are the ones who are blessed by our prayers for others. By calling on God and listing what needs to be done we are getting our own needs in focus as w;ll.
        How incredibly great that God allows us the time to tell him what we and those on own prayer list need. Not only that but we are privileged to enroll in the School of Prayer, to learn through practice how to pray as effectively as possible. As to telling Him what we need, even in detail, is not unlike the second half of the Lords Prayer where Jesus tells his disciples how to  pray:
       Give us this day our daily bread
       Forgive us our debt
       Lead us not into temptation
       Deliver us from evil
As you can see, Jesus is telling us to ask God for what he should give us. We are to ask for food, that our debts be forgiven, that he not lead us into temptation, and that he deliver us temptation. Didn’t God  know all that? Or course, but for now we need to tell him anyway.