Here’s Some Encouragement To Growing In Prayer

May 24th, 2025
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I love the devotional by David Powlison, “Take Heart: Devotions to Deepen Your Faith”! I have read it a few years now and find encouragement and wisdom that points me to God’s Word and moves me toward Him and people. Below is one that has encouraged me in prayer, I hope it does for you too:

Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray.” —Luke 11:1

It’s hard to learn how to pray. We can sometimes make an intelligent, honest request from capable friends whom we trust for something we need. But somehow when making a request is termed “praying” and the capable party is termed “God,” things tend to get tangled. You’ve seen it, heard it, done it: the contorted syntax, formulaic phrasing, meaningless repetition, artificially pious tone of voice. If you talked to your friends that way, they’d think you’d lost your mind!

But if your understanding of prayer changes . . . if your practice of prayer then changes . . . if the prayer requests you make change, then you will change, and so will your relationship with God and his people.

When you pray, remember the three emphases of biblical prayer: circumstantial prayers, wisdom prayers, and kingdom prayers. Sometimes we ask God to change our circumstances: heal the sick, give us daily bread. Sometimes we ask God to change us: deepen my faith, teach us to love each other, forgive our sins. Sometimes we ask God to change everything by revealing himself more fully: your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

When any one of these three gets detached from the other two, prayer tends to go sour. If you just pray for better circumstances, then God becomes the errand boy—no sanctifying purposes, no higher glory. If you only pray for personal change, then it tends to reveal a self-absorbed spirituality detached from engagement with other people and the tasks of life. If you only pray for the sweeping invasion of the kingdom, then prayers tend toward irrelevance and over-generalization.

Learn to pray with the three-stranded braid of our real need.

Good writing and encouragement here isn’t it?
May the Lord grow you in Him.

I love you church and look forward to continuing to walk with you in Christ.
                           
Nothing on my own,

Pastor John

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