Organizing your prayer life is important so that you can grow in the area of prayer. Set aside a consistent time each day to pray. It can be any time:
- Early morning
- During a lunch break
- While exercising
- In the evening before bed
Different systems you can use to organize your prayer requests: How do you want to organize your prayer requests for people? My favorite is visual prayer, but let me explain a few different systems to help you keep track of the people you pray for.
- Prayer journal: Spiral notebook, leather-bound book, binder with dividers for different categories of people in your life.
- Picture journal: Photos of people you pray for, glued to the top of each page in a binder, with their requests underneath.
- Recipe Box with 3 by 5 cards: Each card is a different person with requests for each person, with dividers for categories like family, friends, church, missionaries.
- Printed list: Typed up prayer requests of different people, or handwritten paper with everyone’s requests.
- Visual prayer: My favorite type of prayer, where you picture each person in your mind with their prayer requests pictured around them. You write nothing down. Each category has its own circle. For example, I picture the people from my Bible study sitting around a room, and I picture each person as I pray for them. I usually pray for people in the same order so I don’t forget them. It’s like mind mapping. I explain this more in the audio.
This is the way most of my personal prayers are structured:
- Silence: Open my heart to God and be still for at least a minute.
- Confess all known sin. Ask God for unknown sin.
- Intercession interspersed with thanksgiving. This takes the majority of the time, where I intercede for other people, thanking God for answered requests when I get to those people in my prayers.
- Praise and adoration: I usually do this through song, separately, unless it comes out spontaneously at the beginning when I have rested in silence before the Lord.
Here is the half-hour workshop on how to organize your prayer life:
- Organizing Your Prayer Life (Download this audio to your desktop by choosing “Save as,” then “Desktop.”)
For more prayer posts, follow my prayer page on Facebook.
Tags: Christian Living, prayer
Thank you, Susan. These are wonderful ideas. I think I’ll start doing my picture journal or prayer box right away. I know it will help me to be more purposefull in my praying. Thank you!
Oh, I’m glad it will help you be more purposeful in your prayers! The deeper I go with God in prayer, the more I understand how vital prayer is.
I love some of these ideas, Susan! I haven’t tried some of these before, but they seem like they would be helpful! I’m going to try a few in this new year! 🙂
Hurray! I was hoping this post would inspire people to try new things to deepen their prayer lives.
I am very glad that I came across this. I am over our prayer study group at my church and would love to implement some of your ideas. If you have the time here is my email address : aray711@gmail.com.
Thank you in advance.
Feel free to implement any of the ideas I’ve mentioned. If you have a question, you can e-mail me at castlesusan@gmail.com
YES YES YES ! Thank you for this wonderful encouragement and tips! I love the during exercise idea……..
Since I don’t like exercising anyway, might as well use that time accomplishing something of eternal value!
I love this Susan! Very inspiring and encouraging!
I never thought to do #2: “Picture journal: Photos of people you pray for, glued to the top of each page in a binder, with their requests underneath”
I love that idea and will build my own personal journal with that!
Thank you for your ideas!
XO Donna
Glad you liked the picture journal idea! My kids loved it when they were little because then they knew who we were praying for.
It’s on my list this year to begin a prayer journal. I love the other ideas you’ve suggested though, and as usual, you’ve been so helpful and inspiring xx