Organizing Your Prayer Life

January 3rd, 2014

organizing-your-prayer-life

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.

  1. Prayer journal: Spiral notebook, leather-bound book, binder with dividers for different categories of people in your life.
  2. Picture journal: Photos of people you pray for, glued to the top of each page in a binder, with their requests underneath.
  3. 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.
  4. Printed list: Typed up prayer requests of different people, or handwritten paper with everyone’s requests.
  5. 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:

For more prayer posts, follow my prayer page on Facebook.

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Posted in Prayer | 11 Comments »

Bible Reading Chart (Free PDF)

January 1st, 2014

Bible-reading-chart

This free Bible reading chart can be helpful as you are reading through the Bible, to see how much progress you are making. I like visual ones that have boxes for each chapter, so that you can color in the boxes as you go. My husband created this chart to help you as you read through the Bible this year:

My husband and I are attending a small group Bible study from our church, and we are reading through the Bible. Even though my husband and I have read through the Bible many times, we’ve never read the entire Bible with each other as a couple before. It’s fun taking turns reading to each other and commenting on what we are reading. Simply reading the Bible can draw couples closer together spiritually, especially when you pray together as a couple. (Exception: the dry genealogies–you might want to play those on audio off your cell phone, so you don’t have to figure out how to say all those names! My husband sets his cell phone on the coffee table, and we listen to a free Bible app.)

Depending on what you are going through in your life, different things will pop out at you. Since I’ve been teaching about prayer this past year, every verse about prayer seems to pop out at me. I’m surprised by how many times fasting is connected to prayer, as I never noticed that before.

Other times I’ve been convicted of specific sins while reading the Bible. My eyes have been opened to all the verses about anger, and what results from it.

Reading through the entire Bible in one year will help you get a sweeping panorama of history and how God has worked throughout the ages, to give you a more complete picture of God.

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Posted in Bible | 12 Comments »

Snow Scene Centerpiece

December 16th, 2013

snow-scene-centerpiece

Make a beautiful snow scene centerpiece for your table in less than five minutes. All you need is rock salt (or Epsom salt), a branch of greenery, some Christmas ornaments, and a large glass bowl.

Dump the rock salt into a large clear bowl in the center of your table. Rock salt looks more beautiful, but Epsom salt is more useful, since you can re-use the Epsom salt in your bath after December is over.

Place some greenery into the white salt. You will need to break off small bits of a branch of an evergreen tree, or you can use shears to cut it. I stuck pieces of greenery into the “snow” so that they would look like trees in a forest. But you can also lay them flat in a beautiful way.

Look at the decorations on your tree, and see if you want to showcase one ornament, or if you want to choose several ornaments. A village house would look pretty in the snow. Arrange the ornaments in your bowl. I added jelly beans for color. You could add red berries or a red garland for a similar effect. Just mess with the scene until it looks pretty.

Enjoy your finished snow scene centerpiece! For more fun winter activities, click here.

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Posted in Fun Winter Activities | 4 Comments »

Praying for Missionaries

December 13th, 2013

praying-for-missionaries

Every believer should be praying for missionaries, specific families on the mission field that are leading people to Christ. Missionaries are on the front lines, attacked by the enemy on every side. If missionaries fall, many people fall. If your church does not support missions, encourage them to do so. And if your church sends out missionaries, please be faithful to pray for them.

The prayer letters do not include the real prayer requests, by the way. Those are the prayer requests that will not be judged and taken wrong, like the conversion of specific people, or progress being made for the Lord. The real prayer requests for the personal lives of the missionaries themselves can’t be given to the thousands of people in the churches because by and large, people are shallow. They yank their support if it looks like missionaries are struggling. But let me tell you: all missionaries are struggling. They struggle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers of darkness. (Ephesians 6:12) Shallow Christians in the supporting churches reason that if the missionaries are struggling with sin issues and personal things, God can’t possibly be blessing them, so God must not be in it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Missionaries need prayer about the things that everyone needs prayer for:

  • strong marriages
  • children who follow the Lord
  • ability to resist temptation
  • interpersonal relationships with difficult people
  • health issues from poor conditions like unsanitary water
  • overcoming anger, slander, or any other sin issue that everyone struggles with

Missionaries need prayer about not putting their work for the Lord above their spouse and children. This is very difficult to do. Spiritual work is all-consuming, and pretty soon marriages are distant, or idolatry has grabbed hold of the heart of the husband in the form of TV or any other hobby to escape from the pressures of being in ministry. Usually the idolatry is not a sin in and of itself, but taken in large amounts, a man will neglect his family. Preacher’s kids and missionary’s kids are notoriously rebellious because their parents pour their all into the ministry and not into them.

Please pray for the missionaries that your church supports, and I dare you to take a leap of faith and support a specific missionary family directly. You will find out specific prayer requests from them and be able to pray more effectively because you are personally invested in the work of the missionaries.

To follow news about missions and missionary kids, follow my Missionary Kid Page.

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Posted in Growing Up as a Missionary Kid, Prayer | 6 Comments »

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