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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...