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By: Pastor Peter Schlicht

You’ve set aside some time. You’re all alone. You’ve silenced your phone. You are going to spend a few precious minutes going deep in personal prayer. But what are you going to talk about? 

When people ask how they can pray for me, I usually think about any obvious physical or circumstantial needs I have right in that very moment. If I don’t have any, I start to think about people close to me that do. “Pray for my member whose dad passed away last week.” Or, “Pray for so-and-so’s grandmother who’s back in the hospital again.” It’s not wrong by any means. We should be praying for these things, but if we take this approach into personal prayer, we may only ever pray for physical or circumstantial needs. Physical needs are important, but they pale in comparison to our spiritual needs. 

When Jesus’ disciples asked, “Lord, teach us how to pray,” he taught them the Lord’s Prayer. Did you know that out of the 7 petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, only one is focused on earthly needs? In other words, Jesus teaches us that the Christian life is mainly about unseen realities of faith, not our physical or circumstantial issues. At the end of each day, what matters most happens at the spiritual level.

That reality should be lived out in our personal prayers. We should spend the majority of time praying for God’s kingdom, for his reputation, for our souls, for the salvation of our loved ones, and for the spread of the gospel. Those prayers shouldn’t be tacked on to the end of our immediate needs. Our spiritual life and growth in faith contain our deepest and most enduring needs. (Reminds me of a quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower: “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”)

The other advice I would give pertaining to the content of personal prayer is to be bold in prayer. I mean it, pray big and pray small. We often lack courage and imagination in our prayer lives. We usually have a little list of routine things we’re willing to ask God for, and we take on everything else—our questions, our frustrations, our dreams—on our own. We assume God’s not interested in or doesn’t have time for the small details of our day. And we can’t even imagine him conquering global crises like racism or the 40.3 million people still in slavery in 2020, or even the millions more enslaved to sin heading for hell. We settle for more “reasonable” requests. We wait to pray about something until it becomes “serious enough” for God to care about, and then we expect him to do something in the next 24 hours. In doing so, we deprive ourselves of God’s mercy and almighty power in massive areas of our life and our world.

Do you have faith to think God cares about another Monday morning at work or an afternoon with the kids? God cares about everything in your heart and life, down to the very smallest things. Paul says, “Do not be anxious about anything—your random conversation with that friend, your sleepless night, next month’s budget —but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6). Don’t be afraid to include big requests and don’t be embarrassed to include the small ones as well.

Finally, pray with confidence. God will understand whatever you mean to communicate: your stuttering frustration with a sinful world; your guilty sigh of regret over sin; even your uncertain silence. 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. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.” (Rom. 8:26-27) Just pray, you will be blessed. Don’t worry about what to say. You’ll find the words soon enough, and even when you can’t, your gracious God will understand.

[This is Personal Prayer Part 3 of 3. Part 1 talked about “Going Deep” in prayer and Part 2 addressed the question “Is personal prayer a conversation?” God bless your prayer life  and thanks for reading.]