Is It Selfish to Pray for Myself

Official answer 2026-08-22

It is not selfish, and the prayer Jesus taught contains exactly this. The middle line of the Lord Prayer is: give us this day our daily bread. That is the most basic personal need — something to eat today. He put it into the model, which settles that asking for your own needs is explicitly sanctioned. The New Testament is more direct elsewhere: do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition present your requests to God. Neither everything nor your requests carries a qualifier. Your guilt comes from a kind but mistaken assumption: that God attention is limited, so more for you means less for someone else. That imagines God as a strained resource. There is another layer worth naming. Habitually using other people suffering to dismiss your own does not make a person humbler over time; it makes them lonelier, because your own situation becomes something unfit to say out loud. Prayer in Scripture is nothing like that — the Psalms are full of intensely personal petitions, some of which do not sound dignified at all. Practically: ask for your own things as normal, and be specific. Vague prayers are hard to remember and therefore hard to see answered. Add praying for others rather than substituting it; doing both usually dissolves the guilt on its own. And if you notice you almost never ask for yourself, that may not only be humility — it may be a long-standing sense that you do not matter. That layer is worth saying to God, and worth saying to one person.