How to outgrow your prayer time
The following is a bit of advice I have shared with people who may be in a season of dry “prayer times.” This is certainly not an exhaustive list of how to help your prayer time, and I am aware that many godly men and women have written wonderful books on the topic of prayer. I share this however, in the hopes that someone may benefit from ideas that have helped my prayer life.
- Set a time and make it a routine. Make it a discipline.
- Bring your Bible. Begin by reading a small passage or verse from Scripture where someone is addressing God. Usually, Psalms is a great place to go if you don’t already have one in mind. Read the verse/passage and think about how the author is addressing God. Is it praise? Is it fear? Is it begging? Is it joyous? Take a moment to consider Who it is your about to address in prayer. Begin by talking to God about that attribute, title, or aspect that comes to mind from this.
Set aside a designated amount of time (3 minutes, 5 minutes, etc.) where you do not make any requests of God. Just pray Scripture or praise different attributes of God (His faithfulness, His power, His grace, etc.). To those who have never grown their prayer life, this may not seem like prayer because you are not asking for anything or telling God something He doesn’t know. Believe me, it is prayer! Most of the prayers we have in the Bible are not requests but are prayers of praise for Who God is and for His Salvation. Start thinking of prayer more as “time with God,” and less, “making requests to God.” Requests certainly have their place, but they are not the only component of a healthy prayer life.
Remember, there is nothing weird about telling God what He already knows about Himself. Telling Him He is eternal, or powerful, or merciful, are forms of praise and worship. Then let this lead into the rest of your prayer time.
- I encourage people to pray the Gospel to God. Either pray it from a particular verse/passage, or pray it in your own words, much like you would share it with someone who you were hoping to see believe in Jesus for the first time. You can even use a method like “God, Man, Christ, Response,” or the Romans Road. However you do it, pray the Gospel to God as a prayer of praise, confession, and thanksgiving.
- Pray your testimony to God. Start with who you were before Jesus, what you used to put your hope in and why that wasn’t enough to save you or give you peace. Then pray about how you heard the good news about Jesus and how it changed your life and who you are now that you are a born-again child of God. Again, let this be a prayer of praise and thanksgiving for Who God is and what He has done in your life.
- Be intentional in your prayer time. When it comes to your requests, decide ahead of time what you are going to pray for. It could be family, it could be sick people you know, lost people, it could be peace at work. Now, just because you decided your prayer focus beforehand, doesn’t mean you can’t pray for other things as they come to mind. Deciding beforehand is really just to give us a focus and make sure we’re not spending the time wondering what to pray for. But as we pray for one person or circumstance, the Spirit may very well bring others to mind and we need to listen and be sure to pray in that direction.
- I have found an app called “Prayer Notebook” to be very useful. You can put yours and other people’s prayer needs in the app and even add notes. You can also categorized them however you like. For instance, a few of my categories are, “lost people,” “health,” and “relationships.” This is great because when I decide today I am going to pray for lost people, I can bring up everyone have in that category. There is also a function to mark them as answered and also send messages to the people for whom you are praying.
- Establish a length of time that you can outgrow. For instance, set 15 minutes to pray before you set an hour to pray. If you’re praying in the morning before work, give yourself a full 15 minutes before you have to shower, get dressed, and all that stuff. Don’t cheat your time. Make sure you have the full amount of time available from the time you set or kneel to pray and the time you have to begin other things. But remember, this is a timeframe that you will outgrow. The idea is that as you develop your prayer life, you will find yourself running out of time. That means, it’s time to adjust and make your established prayer time 5-10 minutes longer. And so on, and so on. This is so much better than setting a long period of time and not being able to fill it. Your mind will wonder, you may grow bored, and you will feel like a failure at prayer. It’s like setting a modest PR in weightlifting and working off of that until it is not enough and then bumping it up. This is so much better than throwing all the weight on you can and never being able to get it off the ground.
There is much more that can be said about maturing in your discipline of prayer, but if you’re stuck, give some of these a try.
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