I just love the disclaimer in the middle of this verse, "...according to his will."  I can remember being in the midst of the charismatic movement in the 80's when we were still considered strange because we raised our hands when we sang and said hallelujah during sermons.  Now that the culture has seemingly permeated mainline churches, the behaviour is perceived normative.  One thing many of us got wrong was that we thought we could just ask God for anything and as long as we stood in faith, we believed it would come to pass.  Others of us tempered it with the Word because we were disciplined that way from the beginning.  The major fall-out from that charismatic faith movement is that we have a plethora of so-called word-of-faith churches (if you wanna call them that) that are producing narcissistic believers.  The whole of their existence is to get more stuff-- bigger houses, fancier cars, diamonds, designer clothes, jobs they don't qualify for, etc.; thereby, reducing our faith walk to an ATM experience.  While God's favor makes amazing and miraculous things happen in the lives of believers at times, it's not a general rule. 

These ministers have taken the most sensational parts of the movement and built churches around them.  They forgot the parts about how we used to travail praying that God would deliver a city from the bonds of Satan and how we would lay prostrate at the altar, the hours we would spend in intercessory prayer, how we would stand in the gap for an oppressed believer after casting out some demonic force from their life, how we would spend hours laying hands on the sick and how we sought to prophesy an accurate word from God when we assembled.  Yes, they forgot those parts because they require labor.  Them just taking the sensational parts like the praise and worship and the name-it-and-claim-it faith is akin to feeding your children only Twinkies on a daily basis.  All you'd have on your hands are sickly, malnourished and grossly overweight children. That's the condition of most of those churches now.

Jesus said the fields are white unto harvest and the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few (John 4:35, Luke 10:2).  How much work do you think the church is not completing because a large portion, particularly in America, spends its time coveting bigger barns and more things to put in them?  God wants us to have nice things.  But last I read, Jesus said seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you (Matt 6:33).  God is seeking those who seek him in earnest, not those looking at what he has in his hands, but those who are truly seeking his face.  As we draw nearer to him and seek his will for our lives we find that contentment does not lie in those things which perish but with an everlasting love that comes only from the father.  In short, seek his face so that your prayers reach heaven!