What to Pray

As I do my Bible reading, I am starting to compile the prayers that I come across. I will also post them here. When it comes to prayer, we often find ourselves repeating the exact same prayers day after day.

We offer prayers of thanks for food at meals, sometimes including housing, clothing and good health.

Then we make petitions.
If we get really lazy, it comes out something like this:

Lord, please help Billy have a good day.
Lord, please watch over us we travel.
Lord, please grant grace for my encounters today.

None of these are bad prayers. We do need to be thankful and we do need the Lord's help and grace today. But we should also be growing in our prayers and learning to pray expansively in the Lord's will. After all, He tells us that when we pray in His will, we have the request. Wouldn't you like that?

When we learn to pray in the Lord's will, we are becoming Christ minded. This gives us even more boldness to be importunate in our prayers, seeking those things that we know are the revealed will of God and seeking them diligently until He grants them.

The best way to grow in the Lord's will in prayer is to mimic Spirit inspired prayers in Scripture. Some of them we should pray directly but we can use them all as templates to teach us how to pray.

Of course, there is the Lord's Prayer and we could argue that we should use that prayer as the base template. And then, inside that template, we should be learning what else to pray.

So, here is one from Philippians to pray for fellow Christians.
       Phil. 1:9   And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment;  10 That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ;  11 Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.