Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11185. Praying for family who do not yet know Christ is one of the most persistent forms of intercession many Christians ever practise, sometimes stretching across decades with seemingly little visible change. I have sat with parents who have prayed for a wandering adult child for twenty years, and with adult children who have…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11122. Bedtime prayer is one of the oldest habits in Christian devotion, older than any of the specific words we now associate with it, and it answers a need every single one of us feels: the mind will not always switch off simply because the lights do. Should you pray at bedtime, and if…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11121. Praying over meals is such a familiar habit in many Christian households that we rarely stop to ask why we do it, or whether it still means anything after the thousandth repetition of the same few words. Some of us grew up around a table where grace was said automatically, almost without anyone…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 11159. Spiritual dryness is that unsettling season when prayer feels like talking into an empty room, when Scripture that used to move you now reads flat on the page, and when you cannot quite locate the joy that used to come naturally with worship. If you are in it right now, I want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11129. The Lord’s Prayer is probably the single most recited passage in the whole Bible, spoken in churches, schools and homes across the world every single week, and yet I have met a great many believers who could recite it perfectly without ever having stopped to ask what Jesus was actually teaching us to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11128. Praying for enemies is not offered in Scripture as an optional spiritual extra reserved for the unusually mature Christian, it is a direct command from Jesus Himself: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44). I want to be honest that this is one of the hardest instructions in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11127. Praying Scripture simply means taking a passage of the Bible and turning its own words into your own prayer to God, rather than composing every prayer entirely from your own vocabulary and immediate concerns. It sounds almost too simple to need explaining, and yet I find that most Christians who actually try praying…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11126. A prayer list is nothing more than a written record of the people and situations you intend to pray for, and I want to say plainly at the outset that Scripture never commands you to keep one. It is a practical tool, not a spiritual discipline in its own right, which means the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11125. Intercessory prayer is simply prayer offered on behalf of someone else rather than for yourself, and I have come to believe it is one of the most underrated disciplines in ordinary Christian life. We tend to think of prayer as a private conversation about our own needs, and it certainly includes that. But…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11124. hands in prayer, laying them gently on someone you are praying for, is a thoroughly biblical practice, not a charismatic innovation to be viewed with suspicion, though it is worth understanding what the gesture actually does and does not accomplish before you use it. Scripture records believers laying hands on the sick, on…