Six Steps to Effective Prayer and Giveaway

My guest this week is a sweet lady I met at a writers conference. Her new book on prayer releases November 18. And she’s giving a copy away on this blog post.

By Penny Cooke

“In this manner, therefore, pray…” (Matthew 6:9a NKJV)

Do you ever find it difficult to pray, to remember or find time to pray? If so, you are not alone. We are all busy.

Even when we have good intentions, we can end up discouraged as the craziness of life takes over so often.  

If I’m not prepared, my cell phone will chime, my to-do list will nag, and my stomach will growl in duet with the dog begging to go out (and in, and out…).

I begin to question, When can I go to meet with You, God? (Psalm 42:2)

Jesus gave us instructions for prayer in Matthew 6:9-13 (The Lord’s Prayer). If we look carefully, we’ll see He covered specific elements of prayer. Perhaps He didn’t mean it to be a rote prayer, but a guide. After all, He had just told the disciples not to recite vain repetitions (Matthew 6:7).

What are these elements? Here is an acrostic for prayer that explains the elements Jesus taught.

P – Proactively Pursue Prayer.

Jesus left us an example of intentionally getting away from it all to pray (Mark 1:35, Luke 5:16, 6:12, 9:28). Scripture urges us repeatedly to proactively pursue prayer (Matthew 26:41, Luke 18:1, Ephesians 6:18, 1 Thessalonians 5:17, and 1 Timothy 2:1). Besides spontaneous prayers we may pray throughout the day, it is essential to take the time to be alone with God to pray fervently (James 5:16). 

In today’s busyness, we need to be proactive about a lot of things if we’re going to get everything done. It is no different with prayer. And if we have so much to do, shouldn’t prayer be on the top of our list? 

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