"My child, I'm going to love you with an everlasting love. I'll constantly be watching over you, and will certainly be sure to provide for your needs. I'll guide your steps through life, and offer you my advice so you can make good decisions.

"As you depend on me, I'll give you strength to endure difficult times. I'll always be listening for you, so you can pray to me whenever you want and I'll hear you. I'll answer your prayers like a loving parent — granting what is good and helpful, and withholding when I have something better.

"I'm going to give you spiritually useful abilities so your life will be productive and purposeful and filled with beautiful moments. And I'm preparing a wonderful place for you in eternity — I have some great plans for our times together!

"You are precious to me, so you can trust my love for you is genuine, and deep, and permanent. I'll never grow tired of you, never abandon you, and never be unfaithful to my promises. Never. In this special relationship of ours, I'll always be true to you. And I want you to always be true to me."

That's reasonable, isn't it? That we would always be true to Him? As Paul asks in Romans 12:1, "When you think of what he has done for you, is this too much to ask?"(Living Bible). No, it's not too much to ask.

But we aren't always faithful, are we? To our regret, we have divided affections. We love the Lord, but we also — to varying degrees — love the world. Christians in America are among the top 1% of wealthy people in the history of the world, and we spend almost all of it on ourselves. Surely our self-centeredness and indifference to the people and purposes on God's heart must grieve Him.

It was interesting to me that when, several years ago, we offered John Piper's When I Don't Desire God as a Christmas gift to our Sound Mind Investing readers, we received about twice as many requests as usual. Why this high level of interest? I believe it's because most of us sense that we don't desire God as we should, as He deserves, but we'd like to. For that to happen, as Piper says, "God would have to transform [our hearts] to do what a heart cannot make itself do, namely, want what it ought to want."

We should, therefore, pray. And give God permission to do whatever is needed in our lives to work a change in our hearts so that, more than the things of this life, we want more of Him.

The Westminster Catechism defines prayer as "an offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to His will..." What we pray for reveals our desires. If we desire for God to get all the glory possible from our lives, we should pray, among other things, that He make us cheerfully generous people.