3. Get Specific in Prayer (Seven Steps for Better Prayer)
3. Get Specific in Prayer (Seven Steps for Better Prayer)
If the content of your prayers are vague, general requests, you won’t be praying for very long. Or very often. If you want to pray seriously and strategically, you need to pray specifically.
Look at what Paul asks for in verse 10: “We pray most earnestly night and day that we may see you face to face and supply what is lacking in your faith” He’s not just saying, “God, give the Thessalonians more faith.” He’s thought through what’s lacking in their faith. And he’s thought through how God could supply what’s lacking in their faith. And he’s come to the conclusion that him visiting would be the best solution. And so he prays for that: “We pray that we may see you face to face.”
That’s the kind of prayer that makes it easy to tell whether God answers or not. If he just prayed for God to give them more faith, how would he measure it? It would be completely subjective. Instead, Paul prays the kind of prayer that God answers or he doesn’t. Either Paul makes it to Thessalonica, or he doesn’t.
This is what will get you into prayer, and keep you coming back to prayer: praying for specific things, and keeping track of how God answers. There are many systems you could use to do that. I use the notes app on my phone, and I have a note for each day of the week. I have a note for family, leaders in the church, my community group and other people in the church, the friends and pastors and missionaries I know outside of our church, the unsaved people I know, and for myself. On each of these notes, I have a list of people, and then bullet points under each one with things I want to be praying for each person. When I hear that God answered one of those prayers, I simply type it in next to the request, and praise God for it.
You could use note cards, a 3-ring-binder, or even a spreadsheet if you’re one of those Excel geeks. It doesn’t matter what system you use, if you plan specific things to pray for and you keep track of how God has answered those prayers, you’re just going to pray more.
But there’s one last thing: you need to pray specifically about things you actually care about. That’s what we’ll see in tomorrow’s tip.
Posts In This Series
7. Pray Through Scripture (Seven Steps for Better Prayer)
So you’ve taken some of the steps we’ve been talking about this week. You’re planning out your prayer. You’re finding specific things to pray about that you’re passionate about. You’re prayer-walking or you’re journaling. You’re praying in community. You’re doing all...
6. Pray In Community (Seven Steps for Better Prayer)
We've been looking at Paul's prayer in 1 Thessalonians 3, and what's striking is how much joy Paul has, simply because of his relationship with the Christians in Thessalonica. Look at this: Now that Timothy has come to us from you, and has brought us the good news of...
5. Get Your Prayers Outside Your Head (Seven Steps for Better Prayer)
We've been learning from Paul's example of prayer in 1 Thessalonians. And the only reason we have that prayer is because Paul took the time to get his prayers outside his head. He didn’t just pray his prayers silently by himself. I don’t know about you, but I can’t...
4. Get Passionate in Prayer (Seven Steps for Better Prayer)
As we saw yesterday, if you plan specific things to pray for and you keep track of how God has answered those prayers, you’re just going to pray more. But here’s the thing: you need to make it things you actually care about. If you try to pray for the missionaries in...
2. Plan Your Prayer (Seven Steps for Better Prayer)
If you don’t have a plan for your prayer, you just won’t pray. So if you want to get better at prayer, you need to plan out when you’ll pray. There’s evidence in Paul's prayer in 1 Thessalonians 3 that this is exactly what Paul’s doing. He says in verse 10 that he’s...
1. Pray Like a Child (Seven Steps for Better Prayer)
Paul is one of the best models of prayer you can find in the Bible. Almost every one of his letters has some kind of prayer in it, and you can see a lot about how Paul prayed and what he prayed about. In 1 Thessalonians Paul is praying for people he really loves — a...
Introduction – Seven Steps for Better Prayer
Prayer is like eating. We need to eat, but if we don’t plan what we’re going to eat, we end up eating junk. We need to pray, but if we don’t plan our prayer, we end up praying junk. Think about it. How do you decide what you’re going to eat for dinner every night? I...