In Psalm 86:1, David pleads with the Lord: Incline your ear, or in other words, bend down your ear to me and respond to my prayer. Why?-“Because I am afflicted or lowly or weak and I’m also needy, requiring outside help.”
All prayer should begin here. This is the proper starting point of all communication with God. The first step of prayer needs to consist of an accurate assessment of who we are. The ironic thing is that we are these things all the time even though we don’t think we are, but more often than not it takes trials to come into our life in order for us to realize it. Sadly, sometimes we operate under the assumption that we’ve got it pretty much covered; we just need a little of God’s help to get you through. We don’t realize that if God pulled his grace away from our lives for just one day, we would act like the vilest criminal or the most heinous Pharisee and on top of that we probably wouldn’t even care. Even as born-again Christians, in and of ourselves we are spiritually impoverished and thus in desperate need of God’s grace moment by moment, just as Matt. 5:3 and Rev. 3:15 teach so clearly.
So at all times we should be needy for God, devastated because of our sin in front of God and spiritually bankrupt in comparison with God.