"Preach the Word,

to have in our lives! Often we don't because all of our bad habits distract us from having a consistent prayer life to make praying a habit. Maybe you're like me in that I would pray and shortly after closing my eyes I would be distracted by things in my busy schedule and life. Or maybe you desired to pray for another person but often failed to truly pray for them as you had committed because you forgot. Now none of this was from lack of caring but more from lack of focusing while praying and not developing any kind of consistency.
I was re-introduced to the concept of focusing prayer. No, this is not some meditation or deep spiritual theology, but simply a prayer journal. I have introduced this concept to the church here and in fact we are going through a series on prayer during our Wednesday evening Bible Study entitled "Defining & Refining Prayer." Last night, I passed out the "Little Blue Book of Prayer" which was just a plain old little blue notebook. I also passed out a sheet with categories ideas to use to separate the areas of the notebook and to focus specific prayer time.

Here are some of the headings that I offered:
Praise & Thanksgiving
Confession
Character Changes
My Personal Growth
My Finances & Giving Goals
My Spiritual Goals
Family Needs
Physical Healing
Witnessing Goals
Divine Appointments
New Believers
The Lost
Church Leaders
Church Ministries
Sunday School Classmates
Missionaries
Community Leaders
Church or Community Events
Other Believer's Needs
"Wisdom" for Decisions

I am encouraging my church to follow the ACTS system for prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. So I would suggest that you spend the first 5 or 10 minutes just praising God. I personally read poetry or psalms that speak about the greatness of God and I am trying to memorize verses out of the book of Psalm that are praises to God and find that 10 minutes is often not enough time once I get going. I often feel so unworthy after adoring God that I naturally want to confess my sins (naming them is important) and this causes a feeling of humility and unworthiness for being called a Child of God which leads naturally into thanksgiving for his mercy and grace to adopt me into His family. After most of my prayer time is spent in these three categories (Adoration, Confession & Thanksgiving) I'm able to pray through my journal reading the lists that I've developed making supplication to God for my needs. I find that I have more requests and things to say than time and have to divide my categories up by days. For example, Monday & Tuesday is taken up of my personal and immediate family needs. Whereas, Wednesday & Thursday are set aside for my church ministry and church family needs. And Friday & Saturday are set aside for my 'others' days which are those outside of my church (e.g. community leaders and events, missionaries, etc). As a Pastor, some days I can pray straight through my journal and have spent an hour plus just praying. Please understand that I don't share this to highlight myself but to show that I could barely make it through a 15 minute prayer time before and now an hour flies by. I can honestly say that this has had a profound impact on my life and has turned prayer into a good habit. I also find that I worship and praise the Lord a lot more and keep a much shorter list of unconfessed sins.

I would encourage you to get a notebook and start a prayer journal. I guarantee it will change your life! If I can be of assistance in getting started or you would like more info please feel free to contact me.

PS. If you have a request or need that you would like me to pray for please email me at pastor.coon @ yahoo.com. I would love to add you and your specific need to my prayer journal. We never know what God will do to answer our requests if we don't develop a prayer habit!