It is truly heart-breaking and arduous for Christians to try and
faithfully remember all those God places on our hearts to pray
incessantly for.
For example, we know that we should be praying
for our government -- national, provincial, regional and local -- people
in authorities within the education systems, politicians in our
municipalities, etc., etc.
We also have pressing petitions to
bring to God regarding salvation of our loved ones, healing of friends
and family members, co-workers -- employment needs, financial needs,
spiritual needs of those in our pathways. And very importantly, as
Christian believers we need to faithfully pray daily, or at least
weekly, for the Peace of Jerusalem, for Israel, for God's people -- the
Jewish people -- for the government of Israel, the leadership, the
country, for the enemies of God that they would repent.
The Bible tells us to "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
"Praying
always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit and watching
thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints"
(Ephesians 6:18).
Over the last few years, I designed and
perfected prayer system as I have used it daily with great results. In
this article, I want to impart some tips to help you improve your prayer
life. Often, we pray for something that we really want, but as days go
by, we forget because of other pressing matters in our lives that take
over current priorities. Consequently we do not pray persistently for
the things that we want to happen in our own lives or in the lives of
those we pray for. It is also essential to know what's important and
what's not.
Firstly, we need to pray daily.
Secondly, we
need to eliminate those "wants" that we realize are no longer necessary
or never were in the first place. You will come to recognize what's
important and what's not.
Thirdly, we need to organize our
prayers. To do that, we need to sort our prayers in order of daily,
weekly and monthly time frames.
In other words, make a list of the
prayers you want to bring to the Lord. Then sort them into priorities.
For example if a close loved one is in the hospital, you want to pray
for that person every day. If you're praying for someone's salvation,
you want to pray weekly for that or those persons. If you are working on
a long term plan, you want to place that on a monthly list, same for
our government authorities,etc., unless there is a specific issue in the
works that you want to pray for more often. Current issues you want to
lift up to the Lord can be placed according to urgency, etc. What I
found works well for me is to use cards to write my daily, weekly and
monthly prayers from the list I have made. Then everyday, you go through
your list as you have it outlined.
As new prayers come up to you
through your own personal needs, or through friend's needs or requests
from people at work, or at Church, or any other important issues, you
just add them to your list or cards. The key to answered prayers is that
we keep praying long enough for the requests until there is a
breakthrough. The Bible tells us to "ask, seek and knock". It actually
tells us to, "keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking". Too
often, we stop too soon.
I do hope that this will help you to begin an effective prayer life. And may the Lord bless you richly.
No comments:
Post a Comment