3 Reasons You Need a Regular Prayer Time

prayer

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”  So Mark Twain quoted his friend, writer Charles Dudley Warner. With floods, hurricanes, and unseasonable heat, the weather has been the topic of conversation lately, but no one has offered any doable solutions. The weather remains in God’s hands (thankfully) and He continues to serve His purposes through it.  In the meantime, we will probably keep talking a lot about it and continue doing nothing about it. Unfortunately, prayer is another topic that garners more TALKING than DOING. 

We admit the ever-present need for prayer, we profess our belief in the power of prayer, and we talk about the potential of prayer to “change things,” but we continue to allow other things to distract us from the work of prayer.  Yes, prayer is hard work, because when we stop to focus on prayer, our enemy throws everything in his arsenal at us to stop us.  He, too, recognizes the potential power our prayers wield against him and he aims to stop us.

Today, I will add to the talk – or in this case the writing – about prayer, but I do so in hopes that this will remind us of our need to talk less about praying and engage a consistent, intentional, and daily time of prayer.  I want to share from the example of Jesus in Mark 3:7-12, when Jesus withdrew with His disciples from the crowd so they could give time to prayer. 

Three Reasons You Need a Consistent, Intentional, Daily Prayer Time

If Jesus, the son of God, withdrew regularly to pray, how much more so do we need to establish the discipline for our lives?  Let me suggest at least 3 reasons.

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Give Pop-Up Prayer a Chance

pop-up prayer

Pop-up ads are the scourge of the internet.  I have finally eliminated most pup-up ads, but now find myself a victim of pop-up autoplay videos.  Some of the videos are ads; some are news stories.  All of them startle me and distract me from the work I am trying to do when online.

Recently, however, I have been trying to cultivate the proactive of pop-up praying in my daily routine.  Pop-up prayers are spontaneous, short prayers triggered by something that I experience during the course of the day.  I often utter pop-up prayers when driving, talking on the phone, or working at my desk.   I find the more I have intentionally looked for pop-up possibilities, the more involuntarily they have occurred.

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6 Prayers You Can Pray for Your Pastor

pray for your pastor

One of the perks of being a pastor is having people pray for you. Sometimes you even get to hear them pray for you. What a humbling experience. In every place where I have served as pastor I have enjoyed the blessing of prayer support. And I greatly appreciate it. I need the prayers, really, I do. If any pastor will be honest he will have to admit that the responsibilities far outweigh the man, and prayer brings the power of God to the tasks at hand.

Whoever is your pastor – and I know that there are as many who read this who are not members of my church as who are, maybe even more so – I hope that you pray for your pastor on a regular basis.

How to Pray for Your Pastor

From time to time people ask me, “How can I pray for my pastor?” Let me use the letters in the word PASTOR to give you some ideas.

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4 Habits to Help You Pray without Ceasing

pray without ceasing

“Are you the man who prays?”  The question humbled me.

I had just finished leading a voluntary staff prayer meeting at nearby organization when she posed the question.  I’ve had the blessing of leading prayer times with the team there several times over the last two years.  I never realized the impact those prayer times were making beyond the special needs for which we prayed.  I answered her question in the affirmative, now I need to make sure I was telling the truth.

As disciples of Jesus, we are supposed to pray; we are commanded to pray; we are instructed how to pray.  However, if we are honest with ourselves we often talk more about praying than we actually pray.

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Focus Better with These 5 Prayer Hacks

focusIn another blog, I mentioned that prayer is hard work, and indeed it is.  For many of us, stilling our minds to quietly focus on any one thing is difficult enough, and when you add the reality of spiritual warfare – with the devil doing all he can to keep us from praying – the task is even more challenging. Today I want to share with you some practices I have discovered that help me stay focused and communicate with God.  

 

5 Prayer Time Focus Hacks

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