Marissa Henley

Encouraging weary women to hope in Christ alone

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My Prayer Binder

September 10, 2010 by Marissa 7 Comments

As I’ve been exploring how to improve my prayer life this year, I’ve developed a prayer binder that has been immensely helpful to me.  I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating:  no system of prayer or prayer tool will produce a vibrant prayer life.  A deeper prayer life will only develop  if you get on your knees and pray.  There have been months when, by the power of the Holy Spirit, I have been disciplined to get my hiney out of bed and USE the prayer binder in actual prayer.  And there have been months when the prayer binder has gone unopened.  It does very little good in that case.  I hope these ideas might encourage you and inspire you to find a system that will facilitate a more vibrant and disciplined prayer life . . . just remember that this is a means, not the end.

In the past, I’ve used a spiral notebook to record prayers, leaving a couple of blank lines below each request to record the answer.  It worked okay, but there were some requests that were answered fairly quickly, and others that were long-term requests.  So I would have to start on page one and flip through the entire notebook to find the “active” prayer requests.  It also did not incorporate the elements of praise, confession and thanksgiving.

So earlier this year, I switched to a prayer binder.

How to develop a prayer binderThose are my goals for 2010 in the front.  Inside, I have a few hymns:

And these nifty tabs – Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Intercession.

There are 4 tabs in my Intercession section: Ongoing family needs, Ongoing needs of others, Temporary family needs, and Temporary needs of others.

And finally, a section to make notes about prayers or hymns that are meaningful to me in my prayer life.  (Most of these notes come from The Valley of Vision.  And yes, it drives me nuts that I apparently forgot how to spell “hymns” when writing on this tab.)

By the time I’ve gone through the entire binder, God and I have spent a nice bit of time together.  It keeps me focused and on track, rather than offering a rote “Get me through this day, and please keep us healthy” and heading for the shower.

I’m going to address each these sections in their own post.  But I will suggest one small, but important, aspect of my prayer binder to you.  At the front of my intercession section, I have a weekly prayer list.  I developed this list of people to pray for on each day of the week by listing all the individuals and groups I wanted to pray for over the course of the week, and then assigning each one to the day of the week.  I left Sunday open for focused time on the rest of my intercession section, which lists short-term and long-term needs.  Here’s a sample of what a weekly prayer list might look like:

Weekly Prayer ListIf the idea of a whole binder is intimidating, maybe just one list like this could help focus your time with the Lord.  Start big or start small, the important thing is to just do it.  More to come!

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Who Are You Praying For?

March 8, 2010 by Marissa Leave a Comment

I’ve been asking a lot of people questions about prayer lately.  My BSF leader was kind enough to loan me a CD of a talk given by Dr. Chuck Lawless at a recent conference.  Dr. Lawless was speaking on Genesis 18-19 as an illustration of the power of intercessory prayer.  It definitely changed the way I view this passage of Scripture and the importance of intercession for others.

In Genesis 18, Abraham petitions the Lord regarding the righteous in the doomed city of Sodom.  He starts by asking the Lord, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?” (verses 23-24).  The Lord answers, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake” (verse 26).  Abraham continues to ask the Lord, what if there are 45 righteous found there, will He spare the city?  What about if there are 40? 30? 20? 10?  The Lord agrees to spare even a few righteous who might be found in the city.

Then in Genesis 19, we see that Abraham’s nephew, Lot, and his family are living in Sodom.  Before God destroys the city, He sends three angelic visitors who tell Lot to escape the coming destruction:

As morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Up! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be swept away in the punishment of the city.”  But he lingered. So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city. (Genesis 19:15-16)

Lot and his family should have perished.  God, in His mercy, sent the angelic rescuers.  And even still, Lot lingered.  The Scripture doesn’t tell us why he lingered, but obviously he was being drawn in some way by the sin around him.  Maybe it was his material possessions, maybe there were friends he was leaving behind.  Whatever the reason, his lingering should have cost him his life.  But the Lord showed mercy again, and Lot was rescued.

Here’s the part I’ve never noticed before at the end of this passage:

So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the valley, God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had lived. (Genesis 19:29, emphasis added.)

God remembered Abraham.  God remembered Abraham’s pleading on behalf of his nephew.  And God answered by rescuing Lot, both from the consequences of the sin of the city and the consequences of his own sin when he lingered in Sodom.

In his lecture on this passage, Dr. Lawless posed the question:  when do we start praying for others?  Usually, it is when they are already in the midst of a trial or entangled in sin.  In addition to those circumstances, we should be praying before the trial hits, before sin ensnares.  We should especially be praying for our children, that God would seize them and bring them out when they are lingering in sin.

This passage teaches us that intercessory prayer is powerful.  Lot didn’t know it, but he needed a prayer warrior petitioning the Lord on his behalf.  The image of Lot being seized by the angels has been an encouragement to me as I pray for my loved ones.

Who are you praying for?  How well are you fulfilling the weighty responsibility of praying for your spouse, your children, your pastor, your friends?  What a privilege to be used by God in such a powerful way in the lives of those we love.

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I write to remind myself of the truth of God's promises. I share my writing here in case you need to be reminded sometimes, too.

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