Struggle with prayer?
This episode is for you! Phylicia shares ten practical ways we can integrate prayer into our daily lives. She also discusses the need to pray specifically and why prayer is not a formula to move God’s hand.
Verses:
- 1 Thess. 5:16-18
- Romans 8:26
- Phil. 4
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Transcription
Hi friends, and welcome back to Verity podcast. I am thrilled to bring to you today 10 ways for you to integrate prayer into your daily life. This is a topic so many of us really need. I know I need it. I need to be thinking about how can I integrate prayer into my daily hourly existence? And so many of you have messaged me on Instagram and sent me emails to our Every Woman a Theologian inbox saying that you want to pray more, but you feel like it’s hard to make time for it. Hopefully by the end of this episode, you will see that making time for prayer isn’t as hard as you think. In fact, it can be a rhythm of your daily life, just like the habits that you have already in existence of making coffee in the morning, getting dressed, driving to work. These habits that we have because they’re necessary for life, are ingrained in us and prayer can be the exact same way.
There’s a verse by the Apostle Paul, it’s in 1 Thessalonians 5, where he says that “The will of God is for us to pray continually.” When I first memorized that verse in my teens, I remember thinking, how is it possible to pray continually? [laughs] Like, who can actually pray all the time unless you’re in a monastery, unless you’re a monk or a nun?. It is possible to pray continually when you think of it as a lifestyle of abiding in Christ, which is exactly what Jesus said we are to do. He said, “Abide in me and then you will bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.” So, I would argue that if we want to prove that we are actually disciples of Jesus, we have to bear fruit. But to do that, we have to abide in Him, and to abide in Him, we have to pray continually. This is a practice I have been working on in the last few years. Especially, as our ministry grew, I just realized the absolute vital importance of being a person of prayer. You cannot run a ministry for Christ apart from prayer and connection to God. I would hope you wouldn’t do it, but people do. And it’s so easy to do because we can intellectualize our Christian life, we can intellectualize our walk with God to the point that we’re not actually talking with Him at all. We’re just memorizing verses and trying to apply them on our own strength, and that’s not what God has for us.
This is why Jesus said, “Abide in me.” Well, abiding is living in Him and to live in Him is to be in communication with Him. We’re going to look at some ideas for being a person of prayer, being a person who is continually praying throughout the day. I have 10 ways for you to do this, and I’m actually going to start with my favorite. All of them are great, but this is my favorite, and its prayer journaling. So, what’s prayer journaling? Well, it’s just what it sounds like. It’s writing out your prayers to God. It’s literally sharing your heart with God on paper. I’ve gotten some questions about this from people who are like, “Okay, but what do you actually do?” I honestly don’t know how to explain it any other way than what I just said. Like you’re writing out what you would say out loud. You’re writing it on paper. [laughs] When I share this, people often say, “Well, do you then need to say it again out loud?” And this really actually broke my heart because it made me think. People really believe that unless they do prayer in a certain formula, God doesn’t hear them and just it crushes me. That people could be thinking, “Oh, I have to do a certain formula of prayer or I have to say it out loud, and I have to say the magic word in Jesus’ name amen for God to hear me.”
That is not what we see in scripture. Prayer looks so many different ways in scripture, and this is just one of those ways. But what you’re saying out loud or in your mind is already perceived by God. So, writing it out isn’t going to make any difference. It’s just that it may help you focus more during your prayer time. That’s why I like it because I find that I can get distracted very easily. I can fall asleep and so instead of praying in my mind or even out loud, which is helpful, I will write out my prayers and kind of process it as I’m writing. So, prayer journaling is a great way to spend dedicated time in prayer, whether that’s 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 5 minutes, I try to do a couple of pages of a written prayer time a day.
The second suggestion I have is called prayer doodling and prayer doodling is, you’re probably laughing when you hear me say this, like, did Phylicia really suggest this? I first learned about this from my friend Diana, who I’m in a prayer group with and she showed me a picture of how to do it. Essentially, if you find that you focus better by drawing, as a lot of kinesthetic learners do, then this might be a good method for you. As you are in your prayer time, you can sit down and begin drawing a picture. Say, you decide you’re going to draw a forest or a nature scene. As you draw the trees, pray over a specific issue or person. As you then move to draw a stream or the grass, pray over something or someone else. For as long as you’re drawing that thing, you are focusing on that prayer topic. And then when you finish your drawing, you’re done praying. This can be a great way to dedicate specific time to your prayer habit while also engaging yourself physically.
The third suggestion for integrating prayer into your day is to write names of people you want to pray for in visible places. I actually love to do this with a dry erase marker. You can take a dry erase and write someone’s name or maybe it’s just a topic on the mirror in your bathroom. If you have a second bathroom, do a different one on that mirror. Write it on your window, write it on your car’s rear-view mirror. You can write these little names in these different places where you’ll be as you go about your day, and when you see that name, you are reminded to pray for them. A super easy quick way to keep that before your eyes. You could also do this method to write Bible verses you’re memorizing. You could use this method and use sticky notes instead so then you aren’t only writing on surfaces that can be written on, you could use sticky notes anywhere. So, this is a great way to integrate these little reminders, trigger points to pray throughout your day. Hey, remember, since prayer is not a formula where we’re trying to say the right thing to get God to do something, it’s an emotional and spiritual relationship. By seeing this in different places, it reminds us to pray even for 30 seconds. It doesn’t have to be a minute long, five minutes long for it to “work.” You’re just talking with God and bringing people before Him and entrusting them to the Holy Spirit. As we’ll talk about at the end, pray specifically because then your eyes are open to His answers.
The fourth suggestion I have is to set prayer alarms. So, I love to do this on my phone. I love to take my phone, go into the alarm app and set three alarms for the day. I set one at 09:00, one at noon, and one at 04:30. At each of these I have a different group of people I’m praying for. Typically, I have one set for my friends who are in Christian ministry, people who are kind of on the front lines of spiritual warfare, different people who are battling in different ways in the spiritual realm, who are fighting for people to know Christ. So, I have a section for them. My pastors would be included in that. People who are serving in my local church. I also have a timer set to remind me to pray for my friends who don’t follow Christ, who don’t have any interest in walking with God, so praying for those who I long to have a relationship with Jesus. And then the last alarm that I have set is for my friends, just people who I want to remember to keep before my eyes. And so, if you have a hard time remembering all of your friends that you’re praying for, I have quite a few and family members, I might make a list, my husband actually made me this nice list of my closest inner circle friends, and he assigned a name to each day of the month. That person is there for me to reach out to or to pray over, and I have their name for that specific day, and then it circles back around to that person, like 15 days later or whatever the rotation would be. So, setting prayer alarms can be a great way to remind yourself to pray.
The fifth suggestion I have is to pray in bed before you go to sleep. So oftentimes, if you’ve been busy throughout the day, maybe you didn’t start the day in prayer, maybe you haven’t been talking with the Lord a whole lot throughout the day. You can always start fresh the next day. But I also love to write as I’m falling asleep, as the lights are out, Josh and I will just really quickly hold hands and pray together. You can do this if you’re not married, you don’t need anybody to pray with, to pray right as you go to sleep. This can be a really great way to just go to sleep praying. Like, if you’re having a hard time falling asleep, praise to the Lord, use that time to just pray through any thoughts that are in your head. This was really helpful to me when I had postpartum anxiety after Ivan was born. I had really bad postpartum anxiety that my midwife thankfully was able to help me with and deal with the hormonal effects that I was facing. But I also dealt with it spiritually because we are physical and spiritual people, and we can never deal with physical things without addressing the spiritual. For me, I prayed Psalm 23 every night for a year. It got to the point where I would start to pray Psalm 23, and my body physically calmed down. The Lord truly used that psalm and that prayer to bring me so much peace as I would lay in bed at night. So, that’s a great habit to have as well.
A great resource I’ve been enjoying is a podcast called Compelled, and I think you’ll love listening to it. Compelled uses gripping immersive storytelling to bring Christian testimonies to life. On every episode, a guest shares their compelling story about how Christ completely transformed them. Listen to stories like Hannah Overton, a stay-at-home mom with five children who was falsely accused of murder and sentenced to life in prison. But instead of growing bitter, she chose to share the gospel with her fellow inmates or listen to Brian Birdwell, an army officer at the Pentagon, on the morning of 9/11 when a jetliner crashed just yards away and instantly engulfed him in flames, forcing him to reckon with eternity and God’s sovereignty. Or hear the testimony of Gracia Burnham, a missionary to the Philippines who was kidnapped by Muslim terrorists and held hostage for over a year. Yet realized Jesus was calling her to forgive her captors. Every story on Compelled, is true, vivid, and told by the person who lived it and saw God working through it. These are some of the most extraordinary testimonies. They’re not sensational or fantastical. They’re just honest and true and showcase the power of the great God we serve. I’m certain your faith will be strengthened just like mine as you listen. You can listen to all of these stories and more by searching for Compelled on your favorite podcast app or by visiting compelledpodcast.com again, that’s compelledpodcast.com.
The sixth suggestion is to pray before meals. Now, this might sound like a very basic suggestion. You might be thinking, “Yeah, I already do that.” In fact, I’m actually bad about remembering to do this. I forget very often. But praying before meals doesn’t need to be long or complicated. This is a habit that we’ve formed with our children. They actually remind us to pray over our food. They’ll say, “Hey, who wants to pray?” We encourage one another to take turns praying over our food. Keep it simple, but remember, all of our food, everything we have in our homes, everything that we have that’s provided for us is a gift of grace from God. He is the one who gives us these gifts. I was recently reading in Deuteronomy and it was talking about how Israel was about to enter the land of Canaan and be able to build wealth for their family. It says that in my Christian Standard Bible, they were about to go in and build wealth for their family. And God warned them, He said, “Remember that as you build this wealth, you are not the one who provided it. I gave you the ability to do this. I gave you the ability to gain wealth.” Whenever I look around my home, whenever I look around the provision that we have, it’s a reminder to me to pray in thanks for it, and meals are a great time to do that. So, I kind of already addressed this seventh suggestion, but I want to kind of go back around to it.
Turn anxious thoughts to prayers of faith, turn anxious thoughts to prayers of faith, there’s so much talk about anxiety right now, and I think that’s important because people are facing levels of anxiety like never before. Yet Christians, of all people, while we face anxiety like I have personally, not just postpartum, but in other seasons of my life. Even now, I have days where it’s even oppressive. I have to make a choice in that moment to either partner with anxiety, which is not what God wants or partner with Him in faith. Faith chooses to believe what it can’t see, but anxiety tries to tell us you have to see to believe. And so, a prayer of faith is directly warring against anxiety. For me, Psalm 23 was that prayer of faith when I was in the middle of postpartum anxiety because I was holding on to God’s provision. It’s God promises in that passage to walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death.
Remember, it doesn’t say the valley of death, it’s the shadow of death. One commentator points out that as the shadow, it means that death itself isn’t actually threatening, you’re walking through its shadow and who is with you through that whole thing? Christ Jesus. When we pray in faith, we are reaffirming that we have faith in God’s will. So, we’re not forcing what we want into God. We are saying, “Your will be done and I trust that Your will is good.” If we look throughout scripture, we see that that’s the case. One thing that we know for sure, 1 Thessalonians 5, what does God say? “His will is my will for you to rejoice always and to pray continually, and to give thanks in all circumstances. This is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. “Those are three things you can know for sure are His will. So, if you can’t obey anything else, obey those three things. Those at least are His will for you. So, rejoice, give thanks, and pray continually. Those things are a choice even in the seasons of suffering that we walk through. Turn your anxious thoughts to prayers of faith and you will see a transformation. You will see something about how God moves. That is unbelievable. I’ve seen it even as I continue to have to face anxious thoughts and anxiety, especially circumstantial. You know running a ministry in the middle of 2023 when there’s inflation and banks failing in a potential war between Russia and China. Things like this are anxiety inducing. We have to learn to cast ourselves on Christ.
The 8th suggestion I have is to pray and fast with others at the same time, communal prayer. So, often we think of prayer as something we do on our own. It’s just me and God. But through scripture we see that the prayer of faith with many people praying together was extremely powerful. Now, the Bible also says that the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective on its own, so just one righteous person. But the context of that passage refers to groups of people praying over individuals. Groups of people praying together in the Holy Spirit inviting the Holy Spirit to move, is how we see massive cultural changes in the world’s history.
When you read church history, when you study movements of revival and awakenings, prayer always preceded it for 20-30 years before. We cannot say, “Oh, God’s just going to do what he’s going to do. And it doesn’t matter whether I pray.” No, God has chosen to do what He does through the prayers of His people and He is saying, I want you to pray. I’ve commanded you to pray because I want to move through the prayers of my people. When you do that, you will see Him move and your eyes will be open to the amazing things that God is doing. Pray with other people. Try praying once a week with a prayer partner. Text them and pray together, fast once a day a week. We’ve done all these things, but you can find a way that works for you. I meet once a week at 06:00 AM with a couple of friends, and we pray together over our marriage, our kids, our city, outreach, people in our lives who need the Lord. We have themed days of the month that we pray about those things. You can be so creative with this.
My ninth suggestion is to pray in adoration and worship, not just praying requests. Now, up to this point, I focused on praying requests. That is totally great. It’s awesome. God invites us to share with Him the things that we’re struggling with, the things that we are wanting to know more about, asking for His leading, praying for healing, all of those things absolutely should we share with the Lord. At the same time, we want to remember that if prayer is relationship, we should also be talking to Him and thanking Him for what he’s done, so our eyes are open to what he’s going to do, helping us to worship and adore who He is. I loved the ACTS model of prayer. It’s adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication or requests. While it’s not a rule, it’s not a formula, I love this idea of keeping adoration, confession, and Thanksgiving first and then getting to the requests. But you can do it any which way you want. Just keep adoration as a part of what you do and how you pray.
Last but definitely not least, pray specifically. I cannot say enough how important this is. When we moved into this farmhouse in the end of 2019, right before everything shut down in 2020, we had no idea what would happen to the housing market. We had no idea of any of that. Josh and I wanted to move out of town. We were living in our city. We wanted to move out of the city, and we knew we wanted to be in the country, but still close to the city. I had a broken leg at the time, and moving was not on our radar. But I happened to be sitting in my wheelchair, parked at the kitchen table, and was scrolling on my laptop and I thought, you know what? I’m just going to look on realtor.com. I don’t know why? I’m just going to do it. So, I did and what came up was this house, Willows Bend, the farm where we live now. Now, at that point, I was doing Every Woman a Theologian as a side ministry and watching my two young children, who were 3 and 1. I was not planning on running a full-time ministry. Josh was working full time. Obviously, I had a broken leg and an autoimmune disease. There was a lot going on and I did not have plans of us moving at that point and yet up popped this house on realtor.com. And I knew this house because I’d driven by it as a child and always thought it was so beautiful. So, I thought, what if we just went and looked at it? I asked Josh, we went and we looked at it.
We began to pray. Lord, we don’t feel like this is the best timing. We were about to go on a two-week vacation to Virginia, which is where Josh is originally from, and I thought, well, let’s just pray about it. We’ll just pray. If this is what God wants, we’ll pray about it and we’ll see what happens. We’ll see what God does. I won’t get into the whole story. If you want to see the whole story, I have a highlight on my Instagram called House Story that tells everything that happened. But essentially our specific prayers, specific, we needed a certain number to buy the house in order to afford it. We needed a certain time frame, 30 days. We needed a certain buyer for it to work. All of those specific prayers that we prayed fell into place, but before they fell into place, they all fell apart. And halfway through the month, it looked like nothing was going to work out and were just going to have to accept that God’s answer was no. And so, we again just prayed specifically and I to this day have the notes I wrote, the specific prayer requests that I had written down, the dates that needed to be met and the numbers that needed to happen for this to occur.
Praying specifically and saying, “God, this is what we need, but if it’s not your will, we will accept your answer as no, but this is what we need and this is what we’re to do.” And all of it fell into place and we moved into this house at the end of 2019. Right after that, the housing market exploded. What’s wild about this is the house, the farm where we live has three outbuildings. One has our animals in it, one is our garage, and one is an extra barn. The garage is a three-car garage with a workshop, and it had existing floor-to-ceiling shelves as well as a workbench that ran all the way around the third car portion of the garage. We had no idea at that point that in the middle of 2020, Josh would have to leave his job for reasons outside of our control, and he would come home to run the ministry with me. We had no idea that were going to be shipping out of that space. That we would need floor-to-ceiling storage, that we would need a workbench for all of our shipping supplies, that we would need to have that space for hosting Verity conference, that we would need to use this farm as a place for people to gather and to enjoy learning about God and loving one another. We did not know when we prayed specifically over our little dream of living in the country, but God did.
I want to share this story with you to say, pray specifically, no, it doesn’t always get answered the way we want. I also prayed specifically over my autoimmune disease for five years. For five years, I wasn’t healed until I was. Sometimes God doesn’t answer, or He doesn’t answer on our timing, but He does answer. Even when the answer is no or wait or you’ll see, He does answer. He’s trustworthy, because we don’t pray for what we get. If God had said no to the house, we could have still lived a fulfilling and called life at our little house downtown. We still could have been hospitable, as were already being in our 1100 square foot house. We didn’t need a bigger house in order to do what God had asked us to do. We were already doing that and then God happened to lead us to a different space. My point when it comes to praying specifically is not to goad God into listening. It’s not to force God’s hand or to be a formula, but to recognize. You can’t hide your heart’s desires from Him. You might as well tell Him. You might as well share it with Him. You might as well walk with Him through the places He’s leading you and learn to hear His voice, and learn to see what He’s doing.
People who do not pray do not see God move. People who do not pray cannot be shocked when they say, I never see God. I would even say your heart matters in how you pray. If you’re only ever praying to test God or only ever praying because you’re angry at God, you are welcome to share your heart’s feelings with Him. He’s big enough to handle that. But at the same time remember, if there is no recognition of His character or His trustworthiness, no faith in His goodness that he’s outlined for you in scripture, no looking back at how He was faithful to Israel, how He was faithful as the messiah. If there’s none of that, you’ll probably also miss His faithfulness in your life. You’ll probably also miss His faithfulness today. Pray specifically and if you don’t have the faith for it, ask Him to help your unbelief and to show you just how good He is, what He’s already doing, and to remind you of how He has acted on your behalf in the past.
These are 10 ways you can increase your daily consistency in prayer. Ten ways that you can point yourself towards a prayer life that is thriving and growing each day. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to say the right words, and it doesn’t only have to look like sitting on your knees by the bed praying in the way that we see in the picture books. We actually can pray as we’re going about our day, as we’re washing dishes, as we’re driving to work, as those anxious thoughts come, as you’re facing a difficult conversation, invite God into that because that’s exactly where He wants to be.