Because prayer IS part of our job, not just an activity for our personal devotional time!

Here are two simple prayer tools have radically improved our prayer times together at home!

We take turns praying for family members, as well as all of you and more!  Try this:

5-5-5

The name of this simple strategy is exactly what it is:  three blocks of 5-minute prayers.  During each block of time, pray for a different topic.  Pick any topics you like.  Examples could include:  (set the timer on your phone)

1.  Three different sections of a psalm.
2. The different lost people you know
3. The lost in your family and neighborhood
4. Three issues your disciples are facing
5. Or, maybe instead of adding more 5 minute blocks, you expand the time into 10-10-10.  Great!  Make this tool your own.  But, start with three 5s.  It’s easy.  It’ll get you started.  And that’s the thing with prayer.  We need to do it.  So, start, and trust that God will grow you into more “5s” as time goes by.

PRAYER NOTEBOOK (this is another tool you can use separately or together with the one above)

Having a prayer notebook is a good way to organize prayer.  You can choose to simply pray through the different topics each day.  Or, you can do it with the 5-5-5 strategy above.  Even if your notebook is filled with topics, you can work your way  through the whole book.  On Monday, you can pray through the first three topics in the notebook.  Tuesday, pray through the next three, etc.  When you’re done, you can go back to the beginning.

Some topic ideas are:

1.  God’s End Vision (Rev 7:9-10) – what heaven will be like
2. Your vision for your people
3. Christians you know who need to become disciple makers
4. Lost people you know
5. Governmental leaders in your area
6. For God’s Kingdom to come meaning healing and restoring people
7. For God to protect us from the Evil One

Let’s not only do this but teach it to others.  Let’s multiply prayer.

Rick and I are enjoying doing these practices daily!  There is an app called ECHO that is also helping us have our prayer list available and easy to share with each other.

We will be praying for each of you to find a prayer partner and do these things to increase our prayer life.  Let us know how it goes this next week as you try this.