Prayer

Hi Everyone, This question came up on my mind last week. Who and what do we pray for? Do we pray for our family and friends? Do we pray for the world around us? Which one is our highest priority? Prayer points can include:

1. Church growth or chuch
2. The growth of Christianity, those who are prosecuted because of evangelism etc
3. Family (Believers & Non Believers, health etc)
4. Prayer for ourselves(Our walk with God, quiet time, job, safe and pleasant trip while travelling for work or leisure, challenges etc)
5. Friends (Believers & Non Believers)
6. World (Environment, poverty, development of environmental friendly cars, crisis, diseases, economy, peace etc)
7. Our country and neighbouring countries
8. Those who are not well (Cancer, illnesses) either in church or family or friends

Is it considered that we are self centered if we only pray for ourselves and our family? God told us to put others first before ourselves. He also showed us the meaning of serving others. It is not wrong to pray for ourselves and our family but we also need to pray for those around us and for the world as well. As Christians, we play an important role to pray for others. In most situations, God will answer our prayers if it is indeed his will. So, how do we plan to pray like this? I tend to miss one of the prayer points listed above when I pray. For example, let's say I want to pray everything at one go but I will miss out one. For example, after I prayed for our country, I missed praying to pray for the world.

An alternative way that I thought is that we take one or two prayer points daily. By doing so, we will cover all of them. Is this way of praying effective? We can also join the corporate prayer at church or we can also pray in our cell group. The thing about praying in the cell or bible study group is that we do not share completely our prayer needs with all the group members. There are certain prayer needs which we think are too personal to share with others. We may decide not to share with some of our cell group members because we are not close to them. I also find that sometimes, people are praying for us but we do not know about it. We should also humble ourselves when we pray. This will help us to be able to pray for others. Our prayer also needs to be sincere. We should set our hearts on it. It also must not be an act of showing others that we are a prayerful person. This is the act of a hypocrite. Prayer is a part of a Christian. A Christian needs to balance this with other Christian activities depending on his or her individual gifts and skills whether it's doing the projector at church, worship, fellowship, cell group, evangelism, IT skills or quiet time. Some of us are better than others in certain things. Therefore, we all should work together and support each other as brothers and sisters in Christ to achieve the target of what God has planned for us. In a nutshell, we should have a mindset of everything that we do or say, it is for God's glory as emphasised by Paul. A good book to read on prayer is A Call to Spiritual Reformation written by D.A. Carson. He focuses on Paul's prayers in the book where the prayer that Paul prays was for the growth of churches and believers in other churches. He did not pray for his own life or that he prayed so that he would be free from the prison then. It is hard to practice this in real life though. For those who are working, we will know that it is more difficult to pray. When I come back from work on weekdays, I will be feeling a little tired. I normally pray before I sleep but I tend to miss out some prayer points as I mentioned on top. We prefer to rest and entertain ourselves after a day's work. I hope that I am able to change this. I should be more discipline in my prayer life.

There are a lot of things to be prayed for in the world today. Currently, there is the Influenza H1N1 situation which could become a pandemic. We can also pray for peace in Thailand. In Malaysia, we can pray for the Mat Rempits and the snatch thieves incidents. Two ladies were killed as a result of the snatch thieves. In addition, we can pray for the economic crisis in US. Other prayer points are stated in the list above. These are some examples of the things that we can pray for.

I want to be a person who prays not only for myself and my family but also for the world as well. I pray that I will be more fruitful and more diligent in my prayer and my quiet time sot hat I can know God better.

That's all,

Rogerkoo