Marissa Henley

Encouraging weary women to hope in Christ alone

My Prayer Binder

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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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Prayer: Some Ideas

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About six months ago (wow, how time flies), I sent out an email to many of my friends digging into the personal depths of their prayer lives.  To the brave ones who wrote me back, thank you so much.  I promise to mention you by name only once or twice in this post.  😉

I was not surprised to find that I am not the only one who struggles with inconsistency in my prayer life.  We are all a little too tired, a little too busy, a little too undisciplined, a little too interested in tv and the internet and all the distractions of life.  Our mind wanders; the dryer buzzes; we get sleepy; the kids wake up.  We like to talk to people who audibly talk back.  It is difficult to carve out time to present our prayers and petitions to the Lord, and it seems nearly impossible to take the additional time to be still and listen to what He has to say.

I was also not surprised to find that my friends have some really good ideas when it comes to prayer . . .

On planning for prayer:

  • Have a shared prayer time with your husband.
  • Have a scheduled time to pray with a group of women (e.g., Moms In Touch at school).
  • Keep long-term needs and short-term needs in separate sections of a notebook and record answers to prayer.
  • Have a specific prayer task for each day of the week:  Monday–husband, Tuesday–kids, Wednesday–friends, Thursday–missionaries, etc.
  • Maximize family prayer time before meals, at bedtime, etc.  Pray with the kids while driving in the car.
  • Twice a year, take a significant chunk of time away to pray through needs of marriage, kids, family, and friends.  Journal and write down goals and prayer requests for the next 6 months to review next time and see how God is working.

On praying for our families:

  • Keep notebooks for each member of family, including self, write prayers for that person, or if there are not needs, how you can minister to them.
  • Pray over each person at night after they are asleep.
  • Read through the Bible in a year and make notes in that Bible for one specific family member.  Write prayers in it for him/her to have later.
  • Praying for your husband from his head to his feet–protection from temptation with his eyes, those he comes into contact with with a handshake at work, etc.

On praying for others:

  • Pray for someone immediately when you learn of the request so you don’t forget.
  • View intercession as something we can do as a ministry even when we have young kids at home and may not.

Helpful books/resources:

I love my friends and all their great ideas!  But if you’re anything like me, I suggest praying for discipline first and foremost.  I can have all the great tips and tools in the world, but I still have to make the decision to stop doing something else and go to the Lord in prayer.

What are some ideas or helps that have improved your prayer life?

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I Don’t Wanna.

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I’ve been reading Valley of Vision: A collection of Puritan Prayers & Devotions, a collection of Puritan prayers compiled by Arthur Bennett.  I highly recommend it.  They are short (perfect for a quick morning reading before the kids are up), and they have been very encouraging and challenging to me in my personal prayer life.  One of the prayers that I read weeks ago is still lingering with me.  It is a prayer that I want to pray sincerely for myself, but it’s a tough one:

“I am well pleased with thy will, whatever it is, or should be in all respects,

And if thou bidst me decide for myself in any affair, I would choose to refer all to thee,

for thou art infinitely wise and cannot do amiss, as I am in danger of doing.

I rejoice to think that all things are at thy disposal, and it delights me to leave them there.

Then prayer turns wholly into praise, and all I can do is to adore and bless thee.”

–Valley of Vision, p. 4

I’ll be honest.  When I read this, I thought for a moment how wonderful it would be if God let me decide how things were going to go.  Never in a million years would I “choose to refer all to thee.”  I’d be in charge, and it would be awesome.  And rejoicing that all things are at His disposal?  Delighting to leave them there?  I’m too busy trying to yank things out of God’s hands so I can manage the situation and manipulate things according to my desires.

After typing the above paragraph, I did some strategic formatting.  As you can see, it’s all about me.  My wisdom (ha!) and my wants.  The way I think things should go.  One problem (among many) with this way of thinking is that my desires (happiness and comfort) are rarely in line with God’s desire for me (to make me more like Christ).

I want to desire what God desires for me.  I want to be more like Christ.  I want to glorify God with my life and point others to Him and His grace.  I want to so fully trust His goodness and faithfulness to me that even if he bidst me decide for myself, I would choose to refer all to the all-wise, all-loving, sovereign Creator.  But I’ve got some growing to do in this area.  So I guess it’s good that God’s in control, whether I like it or not.  🙂

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Who Are You Praying For?

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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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