Blessing Your Family, Prayer

iPrayer – Three Types of Prayer for You Today

1. inviting
2. interceding
3. intimate

Inviting

Interceding

This is where Prayer really starts to make the biggest difference for your family. If you have taken steps to invite God into your life and heart like above, then you are now walking in faith with Him, and He has given you His authority over your life and family. This means you can live and pray in confidence as you love and give of yourself to Bless Your Family. When you intercede on someone’s behalf you are taking up their cause.

What better way to Bless Your Family than to take up their cause, their very lives and blessings to God himself? God’s Word also tells us that His Spirit that lives in us prays and intercedes for us, translates our heart’s desires from inside of us to God’s heart directly, even the groaning deep inside us we cannot articulate. That’s the power of interceding prayer for our marriage and family. You are taking the very issues and cares of your heart for your family straight to the heart of God!

(Our interceding references below, in each Day’s Daily Dares and Prayer section, utilize Stormie Omartian’s Power of a Praying Husband/Wife series of books, and the Bible.com App’s devotional study, “31 Days of Building Family Values” by Family ID.)

There is another benefit to interceding prayer if both you and your spouse are Christian believers. The same Spirit of God that lives in you also lives in your mate. Two immediate and powerful things that come to mind are: 1) when you silently pray for your spouse and marriage the Holy Spirit that works in your heart is also at work in your mate’s heart simultaneously and the two of you when yielding in faith to the Oneness of your marriage and the Spirit can be united and love each other like never before; and 2) when you and your spouse are united in prayer for your family you are leveraging all of the authority God has given you to focus on the Blessing of Your Family. There is no stronger alignment and power to Bless Your Family than that, and I pray that is what your marriage and family can experience.

 

Intimate

Intimate Prayer as I refer to it here is intended to be your very personal prayer relationship with God. This is the deepening and enriching of your love with your Heavenly Father. This is where you grow personally in the grace and knowledge of Him, His Son, and His Spirit as you fellowship and walk with the very God of all Creation.

Recently I downloaded the audio version of Timothy Keller’s book “Prayer – Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God“. I started listening to this book on my morning commute and loved it so much that I plan on making it part of my weekly morning routine for the whole year. (my only resolution, and different from the Life Plan and Quarterly Goals I set this past Fall/Q4. I’ve shared the book twice now with family, and I highly recommend it if you are looking to deepen and make your prayer with God more intimate and special.

In Keller’s book two things strike me in the very beginning. First, Keller is a pastor and an author of many faith books, and in his book on prayer he admits that he and his wife had not mastered the self-discipline of regular prayer together. This made me feel more comfortable because my wife and I do not regularly pray together outside of family meals. Couple prayer and devotion time almost seems like the Holy Grail of a faith-based marriage, but admittedly it is more rare. Let’s all admit that even a regular practice of prayer and/or meditation is hard enough just by ourselves!

Second, Keller describes in chapter two what it means to pray and how we might go about it as he lays out the basis for the rest of his book on prayer. He refers to an “intelligent mysticism” of not laying down his theology for a spiritual experience, but instead asking the Holy Spirit to teach him and lead him in Keller’s theology. Keller describes an experience where we can have joy in our prayer with God, an experience of our affections of the heart toward God alongside the convictions of our mind.

 

How can prayer begin to “invite” a greater level of blessing for your family? How might you begin to “intercede” more on behalf of your partner’s needs, your children’s needs? And how might you draw nearer to a more “intimate” relationship and practice of prayer with a God who loves you infinitely more than you can imagine and want to help you Bless Your Family?