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105 | Ten Ways to Integrate Prayer Into Your Day
689 Plays2 years ago
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
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Verity Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity Podcast. I'm your host, Felicia Mason-Heimer, and I am here to teach you how to know what you believe, to live it boldly, and to communicate it graciously to the world around you. I believe that women are ready to go deeper in their faith than ever before, and they don't have to go to seminary to do it. I am so glad you're here, and I hope you'll join me on this journey because every woman is a theologian.
Integrating Prayer into Daily Life
00:00:29
Speaker
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
00:00:53
Speaker
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. And so 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,
00:01:22
Speaker
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.
Biblical Foundation for Continual Prayer
00:01:34
Speaker
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.
00:01:45
Speaker
When I first memorized that verse in my teens, I remember thinking, how is it possible to pray continually? Like, who can actually pray all the time, unless you're in a monastery, unless you're a monk or a nun, right? But 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.
00:02:13
Speaker
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
00:02:34
Speaker
vital importance of being a person of prayer. You cannot run a ministry for Christ apart from prayer and connection to God, right? 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.
00:03:03
Speaker
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. And so we're going to look at some ideas for being a person of prayer, being a person who is continually praying throughout the day.
00:03:25
Speaker
I have 10 ways for you to do this, and I'm actually going to start with my favorite.
Creative Prayer Methods
00:03:30
Speaker
All of them are great, but this is my favorite, and it's 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.
00:03:46
Speaker
I've gotten some questions about this from people who are like, okay, but like, what do you actually do? And 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. And when I share this, people often say, well, do you then need to like, 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.
00:04:17
Speaker
And that just, it crushes me that people could be thinking, oh, I have to do a certain formula of prayer or certain, I have to say it out loud and I have to say the magic word in Jesus name, amen, for God to hear me. And 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.
00:04:44
Speaker
It's just that it may help you focus more during your prayer time. And 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, you know, 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.
00:05:10
Speaker
whether that's 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or five 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 Felicia really suggest this?
00:05:28
Speaker
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. So 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.
00:05:56
Speaker
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.
00:06:18
Speaker
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. So you can take a dry erase and write someone's name or maybe it's just a topic
00:06:51
Speaker
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, you know,
00:06:58
Speaker
on the mirror in your bathroom.
00:07:07
Speaker
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. And 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,
00:07:29
Speaker
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 quote unquote work. You're just talking with God and bringing people before Him and entrusting them to the Holy Spirit. And as we'll talk about at the end, pray specifically because then your eyes are open to His answers.
00:07:52
Speaker
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 9, one at noon, and one at 4.30.
00:08:08
Speaker
And 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.
00:08:34
Speaker
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,
00:09:00
Speaker
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. And so 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.
00:09:26
Speaker
So setting prayer alarms can be a great way to remind yourself to pray.
00:09:31
Speaker
The fifth suggestion I have is to pray in bed before you go to sleep.
Praying Before Sleep and Personal Peace
00:09:37
Speaker
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. And 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.
00:10:00
Speaker
This can be a really great way to just go to sleep praying. Like if you're having a hard time falling asleep, pray 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.
00:10:27
Speaker
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. And so 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. And so that's a great habit to have as well.
Recommendations and Spiritual Practices
00:11:01
Speaker
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.
00:11:20
Speaker
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.
00:11:49
Speaker
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 I'm compelled is true, vivid, and told by the person who lived it and saw God working through it.
00:12:09
Speaker
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.
00:12:39
Speaker
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. So they actually remind us
00:12:59
Speaker
to pray over our food they'll say hey who wants to pray and 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
00:13:17
Speaker
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.
00:13:43
Speaker
to do this. I gave you the ability to gain wealth. And whenever I look around my home, whenever I look around the provision that we have, it's a reminder to me to pray and 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.
Transforming Anxious Thoughts through Prayer
00:14:03
Speaker
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. And 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
00:14:30
Speaker
Make a choice in that moment to either partner with anxiety, which is not what God wants, or partner with Him in faith.
00:14:39
Speaker
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. And 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.
00:15:05
Speaker
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.
00:15:24
Speaker
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're saying, your will be done and I trust that your will is good. And if we look throughout scripture, we see that that's the case. One thing that we know for sure, verse Thessalonians 5, what does God say his will is?
00:15:46
Speaker
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.
00:16:04
Speaker
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.
00:16:18
Speaker
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
00:16:49
Speaker
anxiety inducing. We have to learn to cast ourselves on Christ.
The Power of Communal Prayer
00:16:58
Speaker
The eighth suggestion I have is to pray and fast with others at the same time. Communal prayer.
00:17:06
Speaker
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.
00:17:31
Speaker
The 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,
00:17:46
Speaker
Prayer always preceded it for 20, 30 years before. So 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 so 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. And when you do that, you will see him move and your eyes will be open to the amazing things that God is doing.
00:18:14
Speaker
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 6 a.m. 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.
Balancing Prayer with the ACTS Model
00:18:41
Speaker
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.
00:19:08
Speaker
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.
00:19:23
Speaker
I loved the axe model of prayer. It's adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication or requests. And 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.
00:19:42
Speaker
But you can do it any which way you want. Just keep adoration as a part of what you do and how you pray. And 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.
00:20:10
Speaker
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.
00:20:38
Speaker
So I did. And what came up but this house? Willows Bend. The farm where we live now.
00:20:46
Speaker
Now, at that point, I was doing Every Woman a Theologian as a side ministry and watching my two young children who were three and one. 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 just 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.
00:21:15
Speaker
And I knew this house because I'd driven by it as a child and always thought it was so beautiful. And so I thought, what if we just went and looked at it? I asked Josh, we went and we looked at it. And 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 was originally from.
00:21:38
Speaker
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.
00:21:57
Speaker
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.
00:22:15
Speaker
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 we 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.
00:22:43
Speaker
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 if 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.
00:23:02
Speaker
And right after that, the housing market exploded. But 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.
00:23:27
Speaker
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 we 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
00:23:55
Speaker
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. So I want to share this story with you.
00:24:15
Speaker
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. And for five years, I wasn't healed until I was.
00:24:28
Speaker
So 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 and 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 we were already being in our 1100 square foot house.
00:24:58
Speaker
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.
00:25:19
Speaker
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.
00:25:45
Speaker
And 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,
00:26:15
Speaker
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.
00:26:44
Speaker
So these are 10 ways you can increase your daily consistency in prayer. 10 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.
00:27:04
Speaker
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.
00:27:24
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Verity Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, would you take the time to leave us a review? It helps so many other women around the world find out about Verity and about every woman a theologian as a ministry and a shop. We appreciate you and I hope you'll be back next week as we continue to go deeper into God's word and the heart of Jesus Christ.