Does it matter how we pray?  I shoot up prayers all day every day to God, help prayers, blah prayers, prayers asking God direct & desperate questions. Sometimes these prayers have gotten very direct and profound answers that have taken me on quite the journey.

Me:  “God I’m so tired of these lies.”

Him: “Fill your mind with my truth.”

Me: Duh, that’s so obvious how did I miss it.

Me: “God this situation has gotten worse not better in the last year.”

Him: “Don’t pull up your sprouts of hope.”

Even last night I was listening to a lady share how she had grown up in strong Christian home and had been Scripture journalling since she was a teen, but around the age of 20 her family began to have many changes, along with a few deaths, and she was very angry with God.  She couldn’t understand how she had loved journalling so much and now didn’t even want to look at her Bible and was now swearing at God in her prayers. She said, “God I’ve got this much faith left!”  Measuring out a mm with her fingers.

God’s response, ‘Well let’s watch it grow together.”

His response broke her anger.  He could take it and wanted to help her move forward, even though it was just the beginning of a long healing journey.

David had plenty of rants to God in the Psalms, but so many times he brought himself back to; I wait on you God, take courage heart, Bless the Lord O my soul, forget not all His benefits, I would have lost heart had I not believed I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  He cried and ranted but then strengthened himself in the Lord, remembering all the good things God had done and it gave him supernatural strength to go fight big battles, mentally and physically.

God loved bold and big prayers like Jabez, named that because he caused his mother pain. He cried out God, Lord bless me indeed that I may not cause others pain!

 I pray in the Spirit as well, and often through that intercession God gives me little hints of what I’m praying for: protection for a family member, revelation for someone, but I’ve found so much guidance and help and power in praying Scripture over people as well.  So often that is Psalm 91, or if it’s a situation where there’s conflict then this one is absolutely my favourite prayer .

There’s something about meditating on and praying Scripture.  It opens our minds to what we can even ask for.  It exposes if we are asking amiss. 

Ten years ago our old pastors wife took us through a study of 6 New Testament prayers written by Jesus and Paul, and I shared them here on the blog. Today when I went looking for them they were gone; maybe it’s God inviting me to come look at them again with Him.

God has so much for us, and the New Testament is packed with Biblical prayers for our personal growth.

Whether you pray all day or are just looking for a place to begin, the Apostle Paul laid out at least 6 prayers in the New Testament that dig deep asking for so many spiritual revelations;  and I want them.  I don’t want to limit myself when God has so much for me, but sometimes we don’t know what to ask for.  Can we be diligent and train ourselves in prayer?   Pray a prayer a week for ourselves and one other?  Imagine our life and their life changed by us praying straight Biblical prayers.

Probably the most famous prayer in the Bible is what we know as the Lord’s Prayer, so I would be remiss to leave it out.   

Your Kingdom come, Your will be done.  

I heard a wonderful story about a miracle that happened when this prayer was prayed. J John’s neighbour had a stroke that caused her to go into a coma and she was braindead and the family decided that after five days they would turn off her life support.  J John went to visit her thinking he would do the last rites as they were on the last day.  He held the lady’s hand in the hospital and was just sitting chatting to her thought she was in a coma, and then said, “we are going to pray the Lord’s prayer.”  When he got to the line, Your Kingdom Come, Your will be done, the lady yawned and woke up.    What a powerful prayer!  It has inspired me to pray that line over some situations in my own life.  

There’s so much debate about what God’s will is.  And even in one of the later prayers from the Epistles, Paul is asking that we come to discern what God’s will is. 

I think we see the will of God displayed in the life of Jesus.   He came to bring life abundantly. John 10:10

The devil came to steal, kill and destroy. 

This really helps us to know what to accept as being from God and what to fight as being from the devil. 

Acts 10:38 

And you know that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. Then Jesus went around doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.  

I also found a testimony about this Scripture from a man in Australia who was confronted by a plague within his church.   After burying so man parishioners he went to God in exhaustion asking God why so many and what was He trying to teach him? Acts 10:38 stood out to him and he understood that God was telling him that it was the devil causing this havoc and he should follow Jesus example begin praying for people to be healed, expecting it to happen and as he did they were healed and the tide turned. 

These prayers guide us as to what to ask for, but also the word ask is mentioned sooo many times just in the Gospels, and when we line up all these Ask Scriptures side by side it gives us great faith to know that we are going to be heard and that God wants to answer us. 

The first Apostolic prayer we will look at is from Ephesians 1:17-19, but as I read them one after another I can see many words that repeat themselves: wisdom, revelation, that our love may abound in knowledge, discernment, hope, power, and inheritance. 

I think that sometimes having spiritual knowledge can have a bad rap due to the Scripture about knowledge puffing up, which in context is actually specifically pertaining to idols,  but when you run a Bible Gateway search on the word knowledge, there’s so much positivity around that word, beyond that one Proverb.  

By knowledge the rooms are filled With all precious and pleasant riches. A wise man is strong, Yes, a man of knowledge increases strength;  Proverbs 24:4-5

2 Peter 1:2-3

as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue,

I have shared about this Scripture in Romans 15:13 a few times.  That God the God of hope will fill us with all joy and peace and believing.  

What are we believing? Yes that we have the hope of salvation, and a spiritual inheritance, but I think when we begin to assure ourselves of His promises for our lives and current challenges, it really causes our hope to abound. 

Isaiah 26:3 Says He will keep in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you.  

Which can be an annoying Scripture for someone to share with you if you are going through a hard time. 

I’m flipping trying to think about God all the time.    It made a lot more sense when I discovered that the word mind could also be translated imagination. We are keep in perfect peace when we align our imagination with God’s promises over our lives.

Col 1:9-12 is another Scripture asking for us to grow in knowledge, and bearing fruit in every good work, and in some ways it cross references to

John 15:7-8

7If you remain (abide) in Me and My words remain (abide) in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8This is to My Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, proving yourselves to be My disciples.…

It also asks for us to be strengthened with all power according to His glorious might very similar to Ephesians 3:14-18 where it asks for us to be strengthened in our inner being according to His mighty power. 

Power can be both an outward display and an inner strength so that we don’t crumble in the face of adversity, and earlier this year I did a study on the many power Scriptures and the different forms that God’s power takes. 

The beautiful prayer below sheds fascinating light on how important it is to be rooted in the love of God, and that we can actually ask for this. A powerful story that illustrates this is one from Joseph Princes book The Power of Right Believing. A chaplain was paid to go into a mental asylum to the top floor where all the non verbal inmates were residing. Many were rocking and groaning and sneering and he had no idea where to even begin. God whispered to his heart to sing Jesus Loves Me. For weeks he sang this song and gradually the inmates came to their senses and could eventually be rehabilitated and released.

I pray all sorts of Scriptures about all sorts of other things but for some reason it never clicked in my head to actually pray this. Sometimes we wonder what prayer will actually do, yet I know it does things because I’ve seen it, I just never thought to pray it to be strengthened to receive Gods love, but that’s what He says we need.

So we start praying to be strengthened to receive Gods love and then we just start writing scriptures out about Gods love to lay a foundation.

Pastor @katherineruonala has these beautiful prayers on Spotify in an album called Prayers of his People that are beautiful to play at night to allow it to sink in.

As humans we were made for love and connection and to be acknowledged. The other day I got my little 13 month old up, I fed her food, I gave her water, and then I plonked her down to play but I hadn’t actually cuddled with her and talked to her and loved on her and within a few minutes she was quite grizzly.

Apparently she just needed to climb up onto my lap, snuggle with me and tell me a sentence in baby language of complete waffle but once she had been heard she was quite happy to go and play.
It reminds me of a story of one of the old French Kings who wanted to do an experiment about love so he took a bunch of orphaned babies and kept them in cribs. Their needs were attended to, they would be changed and fed but never spoken to cuddled and eventually each one of them died.

There’s this prayer in Ephesians about God strengthening us to receive His love that we would know the height and the width and the depth and we would have Supernatural strength to perceive it.

There is something to be said about knowing God’s nature that really helps us discern what’s going on. Consistently in Scripture God speaks of turning desert places into streams, of restoration after repentance, of life in barren places. I hope these prayers take you to deep places in your walk with God.