Preparing to Pray. 1. Set prayer apart. The more we pray, the more we want to pray. To do this, you need to build it into the rhythm of your day any way you can: set alarms, leave notes, put it in your day planner. Prayer is a practice that requires discipline and perseverance, and we should own the cost. Prayer is the greatest act of our day ...
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Prayer in the power of the flesh relies upon human ability and effort to carry the prayer forward. We all know what it is to feel deadness in prayer, difficulty in prayer, to be tongue-tied, with nothing to say, as it were, having to force ourselves to try. Well, to the extent that is true of us, we are not praying in the Spirit.
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Prayer is the open admission that without Christ we can do nothing. Prayer is an expression of faith in God’s power, fueled by a desire for more of him. Prayer is an expression of faith in God’s power, fueled by a desire for more of him.
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Because prayer is effective, which means, God hears his people and acts on their behalf. Then, in the beginning of verse 16, because prayer is effective (James 5:13–15), he says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16). To make it even clearer, he follows this with ...
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Praying the Lord’s Prayer as Luther recommends helps us to seek a greater awareness of Christ, other people, and God’s broader mission in our prayers. 2. Discipline our wandering minds. Our minds drift so easily in times of prayer. One moment I’m praying, the next I’m thinking about that email I need to reply to.
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Preach to yourself. Don’t let your sins and weaknesses and worldly inclinations rule you. God says, “Be devoted to prayer.”. Fight for this. 2. The needs in life, family, churches, world missions, and culture are huge and desperate. In many cases heaven and hell hang in the balance, faith or unbelief, life and death.
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Study the Lord’s Prayer. In five short verses, Jesus himself taught us how to pray. Transforming glories can be seen in these most familiar words of “The Lord’s Prayer” if we will slow down enough to see them. In this series of three labs, John Piper puts the text on the screen and helps you mine more for your prayers. Look at the Book.
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Don’t be afraid to pray big prayers, and small ones. 7. Be willing to ask one more time. Jesus knew we would lose heart in prayer, specifically that we would pray for things for long enough that we would start to question if God was listening or might ever answer. But he didn’t want us to lose heart or give up.
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Here are seven simple daily prayers drawn from David’s prayer. 1. Listen to my prayer. Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer; listen to my plea for grace. (Psalm 86:6) David wrote an entire book of divinely inspired song-prayers to God, so you would think he might know that God hears all our prayers. But over and over again, he still pleads with God ...
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But our everyday expressions of need are not the burden of the New Testament when it comes to prayer. While Scripture encourages us to pray for all manner of things, God also clearly exhorts us to focus our prayer lives. God hears and answers every prayer, but there are a precious few to which he always says, “Yes.” The prayers always ...
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