October 10, 2026 · Faith

Praying Honestly: Notes From Pastor Jonathan's Message on God's Goodness

A summary of an encouraging message from Pastor Jonathan at Grace Family Church in Lutz, Florida, on praying honestly, receiving God's goodness rather than proving our own, and trusting His character when we do not understand.

This post is my summary of a message from Pastor Jonathan at Grace Family Church in Lutz, Florida. I found it encouraging and wanted to write down what I took from it so I could return to it and share it with others. The ideas and illustrations below are Pastor Jonathan's, and any mistakes in how I have recorded them are mine. I would encourage you to hear the full message at Grace Family Church.

Overview

Pastor Jonathan began by saying he wanted to talk about prayer differently. Rather than offering a technique, he wanted to talk about the one we pray to, and to let that change how we approach prayer from the inside out. His main point was that we should spend less effort trying to pray good prayers and more time focusing on the goodness of the God we are praying to. In his words, when we come to God pursuing our own goodness we lose, and when we come to receive His goodness we gain.

He organized the message around one question, "How do we pray to a good God?", and gave three answers:

1. We pray as if only God is truly good, so we do not have to be.
2. We pray to receive God's goodness, not to understand it.
3. We pray in the name of Jesus.

Starting With Honesty

Many people feel uncomfortable praying, out loud or in private, and wonder whether they are praying correctly. Revelation 8 describes the prayers of God's people rising like incense, and it is natural to wonder what that looks like in practice and how we can know we are doing it right.

That question is a familiar one for people who grew up in church and felt insecure about the way they prayed. When we are surrounded by people who pray well, we pick up phrases that sound good without always knowing what they mean. The message offered a few familiar examples with a good deal of humor: asking for "a hedge of protection" around a family, asking for "traveling mercies" for a team, and the long chain of blessings that sometimes gets attached to a prayer over a meal. Many of us have prayed words we did not fully understand because they sounded right.

What Jesus Says About Prayer

Matthew 6:5-8 speaks directly to this. Jesus tells His listeners not to pray like those who love to be seen praying in public, and the plain consequence is that if we pray to be heard by people, being heard by people is the only reward. Jesus instead invites us to pray in private, to a Father who sees what is done in secret. God loves our secret prayers.

Jesus also says not to keep on babbling, because our Father knows what we need before we ask. The word Father is worth noticing. We are not only approaching a king, a creator, or a judge, but a father. From that, our clumsiest, simplest, most desperate and least polished prayers may be among the ones God treasures, because they are the most real. God is looking for the real person, not the polished phrase.

An illustration from the message makes the point. On a mission trip to a village marked by deep poverty, a ten-year-old boy on the team prayed a single sentence as the group walked through: "God, nobody should have to live like this." It stunned the whole team because it was so honest, and it was told as a prayer God honored.

Point One: Pray as if Only God Is Truly Good

The question Jesus asked

In Mark 10, a man runs up to Jesus, kneels, and asks, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus answers with a question: "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone." Jesus was not denying His own goodness. He was asking the man what his measure of goodness was. The man was looking for something he could do to earn what he wanted, and the answer is that no one can reach it through their own goodness.

For prayer, the application is that we do not need to have everything together before we come to God. We come to receive His goodness, not to demonstrate ours. The thing that separates us from the goodness of God is the pursuit of our own goodness.

A short look at two Hebrew words

The Hebrew word for good, tov, carries the sense of beautiful, desirable, functional, life-giving and morally right. Its contrast is ra, the Hebrew word for evil or bad, which carries the sense of harmful, undesirable and displeasing. God is not simply one good thing among many. God is the standard of good, which is why we can trust His goodness and His definition of what is harmful. What displeases God is also, in the end, harmful to us, even when we do not feel it right away.

What happened in the garden

This connects to the beginning of Genesis. God created people and called them good, and then the serpent introduced doubt about God's goodness. Doubt itself is not sin. The message was candid that the speaker has doubts too, and wondered whether we would need faith at all if we had no doubts. Doubt can be a place where faith grows. The danger is doubt that is held onto, tolerated and celebrated, because that leaves us unstable.

In Genesis 3:9-11, after Adam and Eve had chosen to pursue goodness on their own, God asks a simple question: "Where are you?" There is no shame in God's voice, and anyone carrying shame can recognize that it is not the voice of God. Romans 8:1 says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Adam answers that he heard God in the garden and was afraid because he was naked, so he hid. Adam was afraid of the very one who had been his protection, provision and identity. God's next question, "Who told you that you were naked?", can be heard as a gentle one: who told you that you had to earn or prove something I had already given you freely?

The results of pursuing goodness apart from God can be summarized in three words:

| Result | What was lost | |---|---| | Afraid | Separation from God's love | | Naked | Separation from God's provision | | Hiding | Separation from God's identity for us |

When we pray as if only God is good, the opposite becomes available. We receive love that drives out fear, provision that covers our need (whether in relationships, work or health), and an identity we no longer have to hide. We can tell when God speaks identity over us, because it makes us lift our heads and walk with confidence.

Where we look for goodness

People are sometimes disappointed by others, including pastors and themselves. The message spoke from that experience, and noted that people can treat a pastor as a source of goodness when they should not. Leaders can help and guide, but they only reflect the original goodness, and every person has access to the same source. The only lasting satisfaction is found in a walk with God.

God can also be found in many places beyond the church building: at work, at home, in nature, in science and in the creative arts. For those who feel they have been slacking in Bible reading, the better motivation is wanting to know God's character, and that hunger is what makes us want to read.

Point Two: Pray to Receive His Goodness, Not to Understand It

Taste, then see

Psalm 34:8 says, "Taste and see that the Lord is good." The order of the words is worth noticing. Many of us would prefer to see first and then taste, much as most people are uneasy about a blindfolded taste test. But the psalm puts tasting first, which connects to the teaching that without faith it is impossible to please God.

The message said, with some caution about how it might sound, that understanding is a little overrated. Proverbs 3:5 tells us to trust in the Lord with all our heart and not lean on our own understanding. Solomon asked God for understanding and received it, but it did not keep him from eventually becoming like the other kings around him. What would it be like if the presence of God in a circumstance mattered more to us than our ability to explain it? We could then approach the throne of grace with confidence, as Hebrews 4:16 describes, to receive mercy and find grace in our time of need.

Using the Hebrew words again, mercy is God rescuing us from the harm (ra) we chose, and grace is God giving us His goodness (tov) that we did not earn. It can be to our benefit to receive these things before we understand them. Psalm 103:2 encourages us not to forget all of God's benefits, and cynicism often leads us to forget them.

Sarah and Mary

Two women from Scripture illustrate the difference between cynicism and curiosity.

In Genesis 18, Sarah overhears that she will have a son and she laughs. When God asks why she laughed, she is afraid and denies it. The similarity to Adam in the garden is clear: Sarah was afraid, so she covered it up. God's reply to the situation was gentle and patient, and the promise was kept anyway.

In Luke 1, Mary is told she will have a son, and she asks, "How will this be?" This is curiosity rather than cynicism. The explanation she receives, that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, does not make everything clear, and yet she chooses to receive it. Mary said all generations would call her blessed, not because she understood what was happening but because she received it. The question for each of us is whether the limit of the goodness we can receive is the limit of what we understand.

Three postures for receiving

There are three practical postures for praying when we do not understand.

• Faith. Asking God to help us take a step toward His goodness without having all the information or being able to analyze the situation, trusting that He will meet us there.
• Hope. Asking God to help us anticipate His goodness, which can mean praying bigger and more hopeful prayers instead of defeated ones.
• Love. Asking God to help us receive His goodness. Love is the greatest of the three.

For those who are hurting

This part of the message was addressed directly to anyone in pain, whether from health, relationships, loss or grief, and who finds it hard to feel God's goodness right now. The pain cannot simply be taken away, but the book of Job is a worthwhile place to turn.

Job is a good man who suffers greatly, neither because he deserved it nor because he earned the restoration at the end. Job's friends begin by comforting him and then insist he must have done something wrong. When God finally speaks, He corrects the friends and takes Job on a tour of the created world, essentially showing that Job does not know what it is like to be God, but that he can trust God's character. Job agrees, and his life is restored. This does not make complete human sense, but the takeaway is that when circumstances are chaotic we can hold onto the character of God even when we cannot find meaning in the circumstances.

Job's words, "Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him" (Job 13:15), are not easy ones. The message admitted that it is a verse not everyone would put on a refrigerator, and that it is not always clear whether we could pray it. The encouragement is that when we feel we cannot hold on, God's character holds us.

A pastoral experience shared in the message shows what this can look like. A visit with a grieving parent began with uncertainty about what to say, and a prompting to sit down, give the man room, and let him talk. They talked for about three hours, with memories, anger, tears and silence, until the father was emptied of what he had been carrying. What was surprising was the peace on the man's face. The circumstances had not changed and the pain had not been erased, but the father had sensed the presence of a loving and almighty God with him in it. Is anything greater than walking through pain knowing that you are loved?

This section closed with a prayer from Ephesians 3:19 for those who are hurting: that they would experience the love of Christ, even though it is too great to understand fully, and be made complete with the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

Point Three: Pray in the Name of Jesus

What praying in His name means

Praying in the name of Jesus (John 14:13) is not a matter of attaching a closing phrase to our requests as if we were presenting a note that says Jesus sent us. It means praying in line with His character and the fullness of God's goodness, because Jesus is the full expression of that goodness.

A short tour from Genesis to Revelation

Several passages show the authority behind that name.

• Genesis 1:3-4. God says, "Let there be light," and calls the light good. This connects back to Jesus' statement that no one is good except God alone.
• Genesis 1:14-18. On the fourth day God makes the sun, moon and stars to give light. These lights are not the original light, in the same way that we are not the original source of goodness. Both light and goodness come from God, and people can reflect His goodness when they are aligned with His word. Genesis 1:31 says that God saw all He had made and it was very good.
• John 1:14. The Word became human and lived among us, full of unfailing love and faithfulness. Jesus was present and at work when God said, "Let there be light."
• Hebrews 1:3. The Son is described as the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful word. This is the power we have access to when we pray in Jesus' name.
• Revelation 21:23. The city has no need of sun or moon, because the glory of God gives it light and the Lamb is its lamp. Nothing we call good apart from God will last, not even the sun and moon, but the authority of Jesus' name will sustain us in prayer and carry us when we have nothing else.

Jesus in the middle

Jesus is the standard of good at the beginning and at the end, and in between, in the garden before the cross, He prayed "not my will, but yours be done" (Luke 22:42). Even in His human experience Jesus trusted the goodness of the Father and was willing to let go. One day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord (Philippians 2:10-11).

A father who holds his child

The teaching closed with a story about a father and his young son, who tripped and cut his eyebrow badly enough to need stitches. At the urgent care clinic, the father's job was to hold the boy still while the stitches were put in. The boy looked up with wide eyes, asking without words why his father was letting this happen. What the boy wanted most in that moment was understanding, but what he needed most was to be held by his father. The father felt the pain with his son and did not take the experience away, but he walked him through it.

This is offered to anyone who is grasping for understanding: sometimes we taste first and see later, and sometimes we receive God's goodness now and understand it later.

Takeaways

These are the points I took from the message and hope to put into practice:

• Prayer does not need to be polished or formal. Honest, simple words offered to a Father are welcome.
• We can come to God as we are, because we do not need to prove our own goodness before we pray.
• Doubt is not sin, but it is worth bringing to God rather than holding onto.
• Shame is not the voice of God, and He asks "Where are you?" with kindness.
• When we do not understand, we can pray with faith, with hope and with love, and receive His goodness before we understand it.
• Leaders and friends can guide us, but the original source of goodness is God.
• Praying in the name of Jesus means praying in line with His character and in the authority He holds.
• In pain, we can rely on God's character even when circumstances do not make sense.

Closing Reflection

I came away from the message grateful for the reminder that prayer begins with who God is rather than with how well we say it. The message also referred to a thought from C.S. Lewis that what God does for us, He does in us, and it ended with a prayer that our faith would rest on God's power rather than on human wisdom, asking God to help us release the pursuit of our own goodness and come to Him with open hands. I hope to do that more often myself.

Near the end, the message gave an invitation to anyone who has not yet followed Jesus, explaining that Jesus asks for our lives and is also the standard of good, with the power and authority to lead us. I will leave that in the words of the message and encourage you to listen to the whole of it.

If you live near Lutz, Florida, I would warmly encourage you to visit Grace Family Church and hear the message in full. Hearing it in person, with the stories and humor I could only summarize here, is well worth the time.