giving advice to my deceitful heart regarding its prayers:

Do not presume to counsel the One who has all knowledge. Though you plead your case before Him, do not consider it His wisdom to precisely comply with you, nor count your desires more sovereign than His. Is He not God? Does He not do as he pleases in the heavens and on the earth?
And yet, He has told you to pray - as a means for accomplishing His will....did you begin to think there was any other purpose for prayer?

Let not your prayers be the cries of a revolutionary in the streets, or the whisperings of a counselor sidling behind the throne, but the requests of a loyal subject bowing before the King, who delights in nothing so much as in seeing the will of the King be done.