Bible Question: What can you get your prayer life back? |
Bible Answer: Support, Experience ............................. Dear Yogi, Tim and Hank have both answered you well. It is true that the key to praying is to just pray. It is also true that prayer in Christianity is much more free than in many other religions. The exact words that are used are not as important as the attitude of your heart towards God. This all being said, I would like to share a couple of ideas that have helped me in the past in my own prayer life. 1. Focus on several parts of prayer individually. A common way to do this is to use the acronym ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication). First focus on praising God for who He is (for example: creator, all-loving, a good listener, etc). Second focus on repentance of the sins in your life (for example: not spending enough time with God lately). Thirdly, focus on letting God know how much you appreciate the blessings He has given you (for example: the ability to think, food to eat, the colorful trees to look at, etc.) Fourthly, focus on asking God for the desires of your heart (for example: your relative to get well, your spouse to get that job, yourself to find a good church, etc.) 2. A second idea that helped me in the past was to pretend that God was sitting next to me at the lunch table, or in the passenger seat of the car. Then I would just talk to Him as I would talk to a very close friend, who was right there with me. A good example of this kind of prayer is found in the movie "Fiddler on the Roof". The main character, named Tev'ya, talks to God often in this conversational manner. 3. A third idea that helped me in the past was to keep a prayer journal of sorts. I would write down things that I prayed for, and then later go back and mark the ones that had been answered. That was a good way for me to clearly see how God had listened to my prayers and worked in my life and the lives of those around me. I would also write down any thoughts that God brought to my mind during my prayer time so that I could remember them as well. I hope that you may find one or more of these ideas to be helpful in your own prayer life, as I did in mine. Remember though that they are only suggestions, and it is important that you don't get caught up in just praying one way all the time or it can become merely routine, and lose it's meaning. |