The Discipline of Prayer: Wrapping it up

Deuteronomy 6:4-9

      

 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lordyour God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

  We have not even scratched the surface of prayer - but hopefully, we have a better idea of how to practice prayer each day ourselves and how to help our children practice prayer as well through the disciplines of praise, thanksgiving, confession, and petition.

   A few things to remember as we wrap up our focus on prayer:

• Be consistent (yourself and with your children). Prayer is like any discipline. If you expect to improve, you must be faithful in working at it. 
• Be reasonable in your goals - set a timer if that helps you. Start with a small chunk of time (1 minute for each area of prayer and gradually increase those amounts)
• Be prepared by having a plan - have a set time for you to pray and have set times throughout the day to pray with your children
• Be spontaneous - some of the moments that will be filled with the most teaching will be those spontaneous ones where a child is hurt or you are training them and the best thing to do is to stop and pray. Make sure you put that into practice.    
• Be Word-filled. Read a Psalm as a prayer to your children each day or even a verse of a Psalm explaining what it means to confess or to praise. It is important that our spiritual disciplines are Word-filled and grounded. 

Resources and Ideas

I want to leave you with a couple of ideas/resources just to get your creative prayer brain juices flowing. 

Operation World is a resource that has been around for a while. You can even find books that focus more on children around the world. This is a great resource if you would like to pray for different countries around the world and for the persecuted church. It is also a good tool for teaching geography as a plus! 

Sometimes, when you don't know what or how to pray, it helps to read good prayers. A good place to start would be the Psalms. Here are some other good resources for this. I would recommend trying to go through a book on prayer each year.

•     The Valley of Vision
•     Prayer (Tim Keller)
•     Prayer (A.W. Tozer) 
•     My Utmost for His Highest (Chambers)

You can also look up The Book of Common Prayer online for free. There are so many good books on prayer, but be careful. There are also many books that are sowing seeds that are not of the Gospel. Make sure whatever you read lines up with what Scripture clearly teaches. 

Here are a couple of ideas that we have enjoyed and have helped us in praying as a family:

• Prayer chain - these are fun! Cut construction paper up and start making a chain of prayer. We like to write down answered prayers. It's a great visual reminder to us of how many ways and times God has answered us and helped us! I find this really encouraging for my own soul and faith. A more grown up version of this is to fill a jar with thanksgiving - each day write down something you are thankful to God for or that God did for you. When you are having a discouraging day, I find it helpful to get the jar out and start to read through all of those pieces of paper. 
• Prayer notebook - this has what really helped me even with my really young children. I made a notebook (I'm sure there are some amazing pinterest things out there!) and divided it into days and into kinds of prayers.

                   Sunday - we always pray for our church and leaders in the church. We actually put   

                                   pictures in the notebook of the people we pray for. 

                  Monday - we pray for friends far away (missionaries or maybe friends in a different city)

                  Tuesday - we pray for family

                  Wednesday .... you get the point.

        You can divide the days into subjects or people to pray for that fits your family. I just needed some way to help me be more faithful and consistent in praying for all kinds of people in all places. We do have things that we pray for every day as well - we praise God, thank Him, and confess every day. We also pray for salvation for the children each day (in front of them). 

         For a more adult version, you can journal your prayers. I have always enjoyed doing this when I made the time. I have not done this recently, but it can be of great benefit to go back and to see what God has done in my own life. 

         I'm sure there are so many other wonderful ways to help you incorporate prayer into your daily lives with your children (check out pinterest). But these have been the most helpful to me. Hopefully, there will be some of you that start a prayer notebook with your kids and you will start to see them learning the discipline of being faithful in prayer as they get out that notebook and take ownership! 

  

*** Stay tuned for our next discipline!