Welcome to our annual Prayer Series! No journal required to benefit from the practical tips you’ll find here, but if you’d like to check out our 2021 prayer journal collection, click here!
Can I be honest with y’all? I spend a lot of time on softball prayers. You know the ones: for our day to go well, girls to sleep, journals to sell. These aren’t bad at all, but here’s an uncomfortable question.
How much of our time spent in prayer is for Christians to have a better earthly existence compared to prayers of eternal salvation for the lost?
The answer to this will likely crush your toes like it did mine. This doesn’t mean we stop praying for believers. The enemy longs to defeat them and make them ineffective in ministry so we must keep praying for our brothers and sisters in Christ to stay strong in their faith, experience real accountability, and to never give up meeting with God.
But it’s easy to get sucked into our Christian bubble. I remember a few Christmas’ back praying that I’d really soak in the meaning of the season. That’s all fine, but what I was hit with was the reality that Christmas was an opportunity for more than just remembering the reason for the season for believers. It could be the first time someone encounters him and changes their lives forever!
If you’ve got our prayer journals, you know we have a section devoted to salvation. But it can still be easy for this to
be an afterthought or something we pass over quickly. Maybe you’ve even written down a set of initials over and over, subconsciously assuming that you always will pray, that nothing will change. Or, if you’re like me lately, you pray for salvation, but it’s very general and hard to know how to pray for anything beyond “that they would know Jesus”.
Earlier this year I read Dick Eastman’s book, The Hour That Changes the World. In it, he shared 6 prayers to pray for the lost that I know I needed to hear so maybe you’d find it helpful too.
That lost souls will:
1. Ask the question, “Whom can I trust?”
2. Search for the meaning of life.
3. Ask, “When will I really be free?”
4. Question why people find it necessary to fight the concept of God.
5. Ask “How can I cope with my problems?”
6. Ask “Where will I go when I die?”
As I read these, I started to get a real sense of what it means for God to plant seeds. We hear that a lot in the church. Things like:
1. You may never see the impact you make.
2. People need to hear the gospel 7 times before they accept it and you may be the first.
All this time though, my prayers reflected more of an immediate transformation rather than this process. And if we’re honest, it feels like a gigantic discouraging hurdle. Eastman’s prayer process gave vibrancy to my prayer for salvation. And adding that depth to it, means I’ve been praying for salvation more than ever before.
What action do you need to take in this area? Perhaps, you write these questions down to pray in your prayer journal by the salvation section. Maybe you need to spend some time asking the Lord who He’s calling you to pray for. The answer may surprise you! I’ve prayed for celebrities in this section before because I’ve felt that I needed to.
The transformation from murderer to preacher in the life of Paul should teach us that nobody is beyond hope. When we come to this section, let’s pray expectantly for what the Lord can do!
CATCH UP ON:Why prayer go unanswered
Praying in Community
A Glossary of Prayer Terms
Prayer in the early church
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