Our prayer life is something we constantly need to evaluate. Are we praying, are we praying enough, are we praying intelligently, are we proving God through noting when prayers are answered and so-on-and-so-forth. We have been constantly reminded of the importance of prayer recently in our bible reading studies on the books of Philippians and now Colossians. Paul was a man of prayer despite his prison circumstances.<\/p>\n
This evening we discussed a way to develop and continue the habit of prayer in an intelligent and meaningful way.<\/p>\n
Purchase or make some index cards, amazon.co.uk sell a pack of 100 for \u00a31.99, take a look here:\u00a0http:\/\/amzn.to\/1pTMtVm<\/a>. You could also invest in a set of dividers and a index card box but elastic bands around each set of cards will do.<\/p>\n You want to think about praying for a range of different needs on a daily basis so decide on some categories, for example:<\/p>\n Then for each prayer item, label the top of the card with the item and category, and then list the specific details on the lines below. So I want to pray for you – I write your name and the category which might be ‘Assembly Members’ or ‘Brothers and Sisters’ and then list the specific things – thanks, requests. For Praise\/Worship this may be something that you are encouraging yourself to be reminded of, a verse of scripture for instance – but if you’re reading your bible then hopefully there will be thoughts which will enable you to be spontaneous with your worship and this helps to avoid becoming clinical. Patience\/Grace is a category you could use to pray for those who are hurting, being faced with big decisions\/challenges\/terminal illness etc.<\/p>\n Then each day, take a card from each category and use that set as the basis for your prayer focus for that day. Index cards are small enough as well, to go with you throughout the day if you want to pray-on-the-go. At the end of the day it’s up to you how you work this – you could place the cards back in the categories and shuffle so that each day you’ll get a ‘fresh set’ to go with, or you can place them aside until the end of the week so that\u00a0way you won’t revisit the items on those cards until next week. I think I like the shuffle approach.<\/p>\n For those of you who possess a smartphone try out the PrayerMate apps: on iOs,<\/a> or on Android<\/a>.<\/a>\u00a0These are especially handy for those occasions when you say ‘I’ll pray for you’. All it takes is whipping out your phone and making a note – assuming you actually visit the app on a daily basis of course!<\/p>\n Hope this is helpful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our prayer life is something we constantly need to evaluate. Are we praying, are we praying enough, are we praying intelligently, are we proving God through noting when prayers are answered and so-on-and-so-forth. We have been constantly reminded of the importance of prayer recently in our bible reading studies on the books of Philippians and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible-class"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=635"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":644,"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions\/644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lloydstock.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n