Changed: CCV StudentsSample

PRAY FOR OTHERS

Tough question: if you were to somehow track every minute you spend in prayer throughout the week, what percentage of that time would be spent praying for you? If you had to guess, would you bet that a majority of your prayer life is spent asking God for stuff or begging Him to fix some sort of pain in your life? I think if we all got really honest, we’d say that yes, we focus most of our prayers on ourselves…I’m definitely guilty of that more than I want to admit. Now, don’t get me wrong, God absolutely tells us to come to Him with any and every concern or issue…He WANTS to hear from you and to help you in your life. But, if we aren’t careful, our prayer life can quickly turn into a completely me-focused exercise, and that will stunt our spiritual growth.

You see, there is a whole world around us full of billions of people that are hurting, lost, confused, and desperately in need of Jesus. When we devote some of our prayer time to asking God to help those around us, we will see our spiritual growth sky-rocket. By praying for others, we are praying for the things God cares about (because He cares about people), and we are growing our compassion by thinking about the needs of the people around us. It also provides us with more opportunities to see God answer prayers, which will further grow our faith. 

But, how can we balance that? I mean, we all still have stuff in our lives that we should absolutely pray about, right? A simple rule of thumb that I use to help me stay on track is that I try to match every prayer I pray for something personal with a prayer for somebody else as well. When I’m in the “Ask” section of my prayer time, I’ll just try to ping-pong between a personal request and a request for somebody else. That’s not a biblical mandate or anything, but it’s a simply way to try and keep myself in check so that my prayer times don’t just turn into a long me-fest. 

So today, read the following passages, and then try the ping-pong method of praying for you, then praying for somebody else. If you can’t think of anything anyone in your life needs, start by asking God for opportunities to talk to your friends who don’t know Him yet about Jesus or to invite them to church (and pray for them by name). But, I bet if you think about it for just a couple minutes, God will bring to your mind situations or struggles that you know some friends are having, and that’s a great place to start praying.