The following article is an excerpt from Praying with David by Michael Phillips.

In isolating the prayers David prayed in Psalms, I am struck with one phrase he uses over and over: Teach me your ways. Psalm 119 is full of this prayer.

The dual nature of the prayer is not immediately apparent but grows in importance the more we reflect on it. Asking to be taught has consequence. It implies something from us.

Teaching is not passive. It implies study and learning on my part. I cannot expect God to teach me by osmosis.

Learning, the flip side of teaching, is hard work. Learning also carries accountability to the teaching.

Delving beneath the surface, we uncover a fascinating insight. From the parallel expression through Psalm 119 and elsewhere—I love your law…I love your statutes and precepts—it is clear that David not only possessed the law, he was intimately familiar with it.

David knew the law. He had done his homework. He had learned the law. He had absorbed the teaching and was intimately dedicated to—though he didn’t live it too well— the accountability required by the learning. He was not praying merely to be taught the law. His prayer reached higher. This prayer stretched toward eternity. It is the word “ways” that reveal the heart of this prayer. I love your law…now teach me your ways, your purposes, your methods. Teach me what you want to accomplish in me. This is such an enormous prayer—to be taught, and learn, and be held accountable to God’s ways.

David is praying what few people pray—for God to reveal how he works, what are his ways and means, his methods and objectives in human life and in the human heart. Where is God taking his created universe, and his created men and women? What is he trying to accomplish in them? What are God’s eternal purposes? That’s what David is praying here.

Our prayers too often reveal what we think God should do, or what we want God to do. We pray according to our ways, means, desires, objectives, and purposes. Do such prayers, however, fall in line with God’s ways, means, and purposes? Some may, and the more mature we grow in faith the more our prayers surely will be born out of increasing insight into his will. But our perceptions of how and when we hope God will answer our petitions will always be tinged with our own desires. They may not always dovetail with his purposes, or even with the means by which he has in his heart to answer our prayers.

David was occasionally no better at discerning God’s eternal purposes than we are. Yet in the midst of his self-motivated prayers, he continued to pray, Teach me your ways…not my ways but your ways.

Teach me your ways. Teach me what you want me to pray for above all the temporal and selfish things I want to pray for. And God did teach David his eternal purpose. That eternal objective is that we become his sons and daughters who are conformed to the image of Christ.

The high prayer that coincides with God’s purpose, therefore, is: Humble me, break me, and work within me the selfless heart of an obedient child.

In his better moments, this was the deep prayer of David’s heart. This prayer empowers all other prayer. In spite of his failings, David continually set and reset his internal spiritual compass by praying over and over, “Teach me your ways.”

God’s answer to his prayer, Teach me your ways, informed David’s perspective about everything— most of all about himself and the man he was. God’s purpose was sonship. As he prayed and listened, as he stumbled and then rose from his prayer-knees, David was slowly in the process of discovering it.

He was, as we saw, a man in the process of becoming.

– Excerpted from pages 85-88 of Praying with David by Michael Phillips