Prayer is the single most powerful tool we have as believers in Jesus! So why is learning how to pray so hard? Where do we start when learning how to pray? How do we stay focused when we pray? All great questions, that I hope to answer if you keep reading.
Step 1 – Pray in the Spirit
Praying in the Spirit is a fancy way to say. Trust that God will hear your heart, and translate it to make it the perfect package that is pleasing to God’s Holy ears.
Praying in the Spirit is praying with divine help. It’s trusting in faith and relying on God to hear, understand, and act. (Christianity.com) It means that you can totally relax in peace knowing that when you pray in the Spirit the Holy Spirit will fill in the gaps of our inability to ask what we really want and praying in the Spirit will smooth things out when we unknowingly are selfish or unpleasing when we pray to our Heavenly Father.
Before you pray, literally ask God to forgive you if and when your prayers are terrible. And then have faith that when you pray to our Heavenly Father that he absolutely will. Praying in the Spirit is that simple.
Scriptures for Praying in the Spirit
- “But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit,” (Jude 1:20).
- “The Lord is faithful and He will strengthen you and protect you from the evil one. (2 Thessalonians 3
Step 2 – Just Start
Part of what holds most of us up when we are learning how to pray is that we want our prayers to be perfect. I want to encourage you that the same faith that gives us the confidence that praying in the Spirit will act as a translated to our deepest and simplest prayers, is the same faith that I want you to have when beginning. We serve a BIG God! And a mighty God. And he just wants to fellowship with us. So if you are just learning how to pray, just start talking to God like he is your friend. The words will spill out once you begin.
Step 3 – Relax
So, you have faith, and you are beginning your fellowship in prayer with our Heavenly Father and you still don’t know where to start!
Well I want to encourage you that, you can rest assured that you are not the first person to have this problem when learning how to pray. One of my favorite scriptures for prayer is Romans 8:26.
26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.
Which basically means! God’s got you! We should first work to pray in the Spirit so that our prayers are pleasing to our Heavenly Father, then we have to just dive in and have faith that God will hear us, and lastly we can rest our minds knowing that our hesitancy is a natural one when we are learning how to pray.
Even though it’s natural to get stuck, rest assured that I have a formula that may help you get unstuck when you keep the previous steps in mind.
Step 5: Create a Structure
The most perfect prayer is definitely the Lord’s prayer. Jesus starts with honoring God, Jesus then makes Spiritual requests (“on Earth as it is in Heaven), then Physical requests (“Give us this day, our daily bread). I love how the Lord’s Prayer is short, direct and filled with praise and requests for what truly matters.
Over the years I have developed a system for structuring a journal to help me stay focused and give me clear directions for what to pray for when I was first learning how to pray, this is a structure I still use today when praying to our Heavenly Father.
How I Structure my Prayer Journal
Prayer Journal Sections –
- Praise
- Thankful
- Repent
- Surrender of Burdens
- Prayer for Others
I know I am not the only one who can sometimes have a wandering mind when I pray. Before I read so many accounts in the Bible of people who had the same problem that use to embarrass me. Espcially since I know if I was sitting in front of the president, I would probably have laser like attention. But sometimes when I sit at the feet of the God who created the universe, I begin to think about to do lists, and laundry etc. etc.
Get a Journal
To combat that I keep a physical prayer journal. And don’t get caught up on this title! To me a prayer journal is any piece of paper that you can write on. Ideally, it would have a few pieces of papers put together, but you can make a prayer journal out of post-it notes if you had to. I do recommend an actual journal though because it’s so powerful to flip through the pages and see how faithful God was as you develop your prayer habit.
Divide the Journal Pages Into Sections
Once you decide on a “journal” I suggest you divide the page into 6 sections like I did in the journal above. If you are a neat freak, I did make a really pretty version that you can download for free.
(Again I have included a free example here)
Prayer Journal Sections:
When I was first learning how to pray, I wrote the template on the first page of my prayer journal as a key so that I could remember how to label each page. I also thought if I ever got fancy I would just print several copies of the version I already created and just write directly onto the paper. But my current structure is to just print one and use it as a reference.
Although I already shared the prayer journal sections earlier in this blog post allow me to dig a little deeper and share a few examples of things I might write in each section of my prayer journal. Please keep in mind I do write in this journal when I pray at night. But I allow myself the opportunity to pray even without this journal.
Section 1: Praise
In this category, I write and praise God for things he is doing for me. I might Praise God for a new job, or healthy kids etc. On the page above I was praising God for the income I was consistently earning in spite of the crazy epidemic we were going through.
this is my favorite section to use to reflect on God’s goodness. This is also one of the most important sections for someone learning how to pray because when you can see God in action it will really encourage you to come back to continue to pray to our Heavenly Father.
Section 2: Thankful
This section tends to be things I don’t want to ever take for granted. For example, I am thankful for a full night’s rest, gas in my car, a car to drive etc. I think thankfulness is an important part of a prayer journal.
Section 3: Repent
These are things I know I need to confess and repent away from. Keep in mind this journal is only between you and God so if you wanted you could use shorthand here, as long as you are honest and truly bring that thing to God, He will hear you.
Section 4: Surrender of Burdens
Ahhh! This is where I write the things that are keeping me up at night! Because “life” right! It’s blank above but I definitely wrote a few things after I took this photo.
Section 5: Prayer for Others
I really try not to just say “I’ll pray for you” but instead really pray for folks. This is where I write down the names of people I am praying for. Above the names are blurred out, but these names often turn into the things I praise God for later and often end up in the “Praise” section.
Section 6: Personal Requests
I love that the Bible says…”Bring all things to God through prayer!” So after I have prayed for everybody else, I don’t feel so bad to pray for myself for things both big and small. These tend to be more of the “physical things.”
Section 7: Praise Reports
Hallelujah! If you have nothing to shout about then you definitely need to start a prayer journal! And if you are already a prayer warrior then let’s be intentional about reminding ourselves how good God is! I don’t always complete this section but sometimes when I look back at the previous pages I can’t help but to give Jesus a big HALLELUJAH!
I hope you found this prayer journal structure helpful, and I hope it blesses your prayer life. In the fast-paced world we live in, it’s so important to make time to pray. Don’t forget I have a pretty template I created to jumpstart your prayer journal, you can get that emailed directly to you for free by clicking here.
Xo
Chantea
Check out my blog post – Why Marital Sex should be on your prayer list.
