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One of the greatest portions of scripture about protection is in Psalms 91. I encourage you to commit it to memory, and then to live in the realization that God is your fortress and you strong tower. He is your shield. Verses 14 and 15 say this… “Because he loves me, says the Lord, I will rescue him, I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name. He will call on me and I will answer him, I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation. We can make this whole chapter a prayer….. Pray this with me, Father, as we dwell in the shadow of your wings, we know that You are our refuge and our fortress, and we trust in Your strength. We rest confidently in knowing that You will protect us from any kind of snare the enemy puts in our path, and You will keep us safe from all forms of pestilence. We find rest close to your heart. We will not live in fear, because greater are You on the inside of me, than he that is in the world. Even if destruction is all around me, I will be safe, because You are my protector. I remember that You are My refuge, and in You I will forever live, because there, no harm can overtake me, and no disaster can come near me. Your angels oh God minister on my behalf, and You command them to guard me in all of my ways, even to keep my feet from stumbling. I will keep the enemy under my feet, as I walk with authority in who You have created me to be. Thank you Lord, for Your protection, and Your attentiveness to me. Thank be to God that You are always with me, and You will according to Your Word, deliver and bless me. Thank You for the promise of long life as we follow after You, and walk out our salvation. In Jesus Name, AMEN.

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What does the word diligent mean to you? If you are diligent, you are alert, you are thorough, attentive, hard working, etc. If we want to continue earnestly in prayer as it says in Col 4:2, we have to be alert and be diligent! When we pray earnestly, we pray with purpose, and as believers, we want our purpose to line up with God’s purpose. In our times of prayer, we can pour out our heart so that we can see the heart of God. We can experience His love, and have that same love motivate us to love others, and in turn, we can pray for their hearts to turn toward God, and then we can love them into the His kingdom. Our earnest diligent commitment to pray, can change the world, one life at a time.

I love that this verse also ties gratitude and thanksgiving to prayer. Once we ask, we continue watchfully with thanksgiving. What we are doing is showing our appreciation in advance for God answering our prayer. Another way to say that is what Mark 11:24 says, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. If we believe it is ours, we say thank you!
Let’s pray this way today, Father, in the Name of Jesus, we are thankful that you hear us and want us to come into your presence in prayer. Today we ask you to help us be more aware of needs around us, and then we commit to being diligent to pray. We are thankful that we know you are working in each situation and we are so thankful to be partnered with you to make a difference on the earth. We take our opportunity to pray as a responsibility. We commit to pray, we believe we have received and we are thankful for your faithfulness! In Jesus Name, AMEN.

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Have you ever heard this definition of worry? Worry is faith going the opposite direction. Faith is expecting and believing for the best, worry does the opposite! Worry expects and believes for the worst. It would appear that faith comes from God, and worry is from the enemy! Phil 4:6 tells us not to worry, but bring our requests to God, who hears and answers us. If you feel worry trying to grab ahold of your heart, start praying! When we pray in faith, we can expect results! Worry takes us backward, but prayer takes us forward. Here is the hard question you may be asking: In our world that has so much turmoil, how can I keep from worrying, about my future, my family or even the condition of our world? Here is how Phil 4:6 would answer that question, the way we can keep from worrying, is to let our requests be made known unto God and then keep on trusting Him. We don’t have control over the condition of our planet, but we can believe that God will protect and provide for us and our loved ones, because it is what He has promised in His Word. Another reason we don’t have to worry is because Matt 6:33 tells not to worry, and if we are told not worry, then we have the ability not to! And if you look at it another way, if He tells us not to worry, when we do, we are in sin. Let’s be obedient, and cast our cares on the Lord! He cares for us. Instead of worry, let’s pray! Father, in the Name of Jesus, I pray that you would help everyone who hears or sees this to be encouraged to bring their worries and concerns to You, and leave them there. We believe Your Word, and put our trust in You completely. We will live by faith, and not be moved by fear. In Jesus’ Name, AMEN! Don’t worry, be happy!

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I love how the Message Bible makes the Bible so conversational and relatable, especially when it comes to talking about prayer. In Eph 6:18, right after talking about the armor of God, prayer is mentioned as essential ingredient in victorious living. The Message Bible says “Pray hard and long. Pray for your brothers and sisters. Keep your eyes open. Keep each other’s spirits up so that no one falls behind or drops out. I love that! Stay alert, and encourage one another so no one loses hope. We should be praying for our families, our spouses and our children, but also our extended family, our brothers and sisters, our parents, and other relatives, etc. When we pray for each other, we keep each other’s spirit’s up! Through our prayers we can encourage our own family, but also our brothers and sisters in Christ! We don’t want any one in our family to fall behind or drop out, and certainly we don’t want any other of our Christian brothers or sisters to be so discouraged that they give up. Do you realize that your prayers can be so effective? Let’s pray those kind of encouraging prayers. Be vigilant about praying for your family, and the family of God. We can pray without ceasing and bless those we love. Let’s do that today. Father, in the name of Jesus, we lift up our families. We pray for our parents, our siblings, and ask you to bless and guide them today. We lift up our spouses and our children and ask you to bless our home, and keep all those we love from losing hope. We also pray for our brothers and sisters in Christ. Help us to be a light in the darkness, and win our world to Jesus. In Jesus Name, AMEN.

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If you are anything like me sometimes just the thought of taking time to pray for an extended time can stress me out. It adds to the long list of other pressures in our lives that we feel like we have to accomplish before flopping in to bed at night. I want to help relieve some of that pressure. We do need to make it a priority, but prayer can and should be as natural as breathing to us. With God in the center of our life, all we do revolves around Him. He doesn’t want to add burdens to our world, God wants to lift heavy burdens! If we feel a “prayer burden” it is probably the Holy Spirit prompting and directing us to pray specifically for a certain person or situation. And who of us, wouldn’t take time to pray if we knew it could change or even spare someone’s life, or change circumstances.

If we look at prayer from a house perspective, God calls us the temple of the Holy Spirit, so we are a house, and God’s Word tells us in Is 56:7, that His house shall be called a house of prayer. That means your house, your temple, your life, is a house of prayer. Prayer fits ever room in your house….work life, family life, church life, and relationships of every kind. And plus that, we live in our house and as believers, God lives here too! He is with us 24/7! It makes it easier to take the pressure off, and just make prayer a lifestyle, just like living and breathing. It can come naturally in your house. Be encouraged to make your temple/ your body/ your life/ a place of prayer!

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Do you say grace before you eat, or take time to pray before you go to sleep each night? It is very good to ask God to bless our food, and then to thank Him for providing it for us. It is also a good thing before you go to sleep to pray and ask God for his protection over your family, for health and safety for those you love. Hi this is Dorette Schaal with your dailyeword. Prayer is our topic and the best reminder I have for you is to pray! Become someone who prays without ceasing!

Read your Bible, pray everyday, pray everyday, pray everyday, read your Bible, pray everyday if you want to grow. That is a really old kids song from when I was in Sunday School. As old as the song is, it is still a relevant message. If you want to grow up in God, we have to read the Bible, and we have to pray everyday. In simple terms that means taking part of your day to read the letter that God wrote to you. If something comes in the mail for me, I can’t wait to read it. We should be as passionate about reading God’s Word. Prayer really isn’t any different than talking to someone on the phone. You say hello, chat for a while, and then listen for a response. God not only wants you to talk to Him, He loves it when we’ll just be still and listen. Many of us will never hear Him speak out loud, but He can give us direction in our heart. The Bible says that our spirit/heart is His candle. He wants to give us light so we can see clearly. Psalms 119 also tells us that His Word is a lamp unto our feet, and a light unto our path. We all need light. It is a fallen world we live in, where evil wants to prevail and we get to SHINE THE LIGHT and let the whole world see! Thankfully, we know the end of the book. The enemy is eternally banished and we will eternally experience heaven! So don’t forget how important it is to pray, and to read the Word of God, EVERYDAY!

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“Prayer is the conduit through which the power from heaven is brought to earth.” O. Hallesby once said that. That gives us such a great word picture about the heaven – earth connection. “Prayer is the conduit through which the power from heaven is brought to earth.” Jesus said in the Lord’s Prayer that He desired for God’s kingdom to come and for His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. When we pray, we get to be a part of seeing that accomplished! We‘re bringing the power from heaven down to the earth.
The Bible tells us to pray all manner of prayer. There are many kinds of prayer we can participate in. Prayer really does change things – and when we pray the prayer of agreement, or binding and loosing, or the prayer of faith, or the prayer of supplication, or intercessory prayer, or united prayer, or the prayer is worship and thanksgiving or the prayer is dedication and consecration, we open the windows of heaven to change situations on earth. I love it when prayer is answered quickly. To pray one day and have the answer the next is awesome. It is awesome when that happens. But there are times that we need to soak a situation in prayer, and believe long term that things are changing. It may not happen overnight, but God is at work and soon the situation will look very different from how it is now. The prayer of consecration and dedication is one that we can continue to do. Daily we can offer our lives to God to be a tool in His hands to be His hands and feet to a hurting world. Daily we can worship and praise as a prayer of thanksgiving and worship thanking God for who He is and what He has done in our lives. Daily we can bring our requests unto God and then thank Him that the answer is on its way. I hope today’s dailyeword has made you more aware of our responsibility to be praying, and revealed the joys that result from our obedience. Let’s get disciplined in our Christian walk to make prayer a priority in our lives. Then our words can be part of the pipeline from heaven to earth, seeing God’s will done right here where we live.
Let’s pray effectively, to accomplish what God want to have done on the earth!

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Here’s a quick reminder, of how to pray kindergarten style!. Stop – Push the off button! We need to be still because we are called to enter into the rest of God, and you can’t be resting and rushing at the same time! Stopping is Waiting – take a breather – give God more than just a moment of your time. Choose to spend time in His presence. Look for cues – God gives us spiritual vision. He wants to show us great and mighty things that we know not of, as it says in Jer 33:3. We are His sheep, but if we’re not looking His direction we might miss where He is leading. Listen – Be a listener – Unclog your ears. If you have ears to hear….really hear. You are His sheep, you know the sound of His voice. When you ask Him to lead you, He’ll bring the Word to your remembrance as it says in John 14:26. It is important for us to get the Word on the inside of us as it says in Matt 4:4 because we can’t live on natural food alone, God’s Word is sustenance to us. God isn’t trying to keep us from hearing Him. As it says in John 16:14-15, God will take what is His and reveal it to you! He longs for us to “hear” His voice. If you really are committed to using words from your mouth in prayer to God, we can put these principles into action. Let’s stop, let’s look and then let’s listen. We have the ability to connect up with the power of God and see things change. I am so grateful we don’t have to settle for our own ability, or to settle for how things are when it comes to circumstances we are facing. Things are subject to change, we are subject to change…..and the most exciting thing is that God is not. He never changes, so we can count on Him. What a secure place to rest.

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To be an effective pray-er, you need compassion for those outside your inner circle
How much time do you spend praying for those who don’t know Christ yet? My husband calls unbelievers pre-Christians, and I love that, because we believe that they won’t be unbelievers forever, and we want them to come to know Christ soon. It’s easy to look at sinners in the world and get discouraged. Jonah did just that when God asked him to go and as a missionary to Nineveh. He was more than a little reluctant. The Ninevites were not the most desirable people to go to, and Jonah was disobedient to what God has asked him to do. In the long run, after a three day tour in the “Mouth of Fish Cruise Line”, he changed his tune, and became willing to do what was asked of him. What is interesting about Jonah’s story is that the fish actually was a rescue ship for him. Had God’s mercy not intervened, he would have been at the bottom of the ocean instead of the belly of a fish! Jonah may have gone through what we feel like when sharing our faith with the lost. We could be afraid of rejection, or even afraid of looking foolish. In the big picture of life, especially with earth being short and heaven being long, we need to just get over it! If they reject you, it is really Christ they are rejecting. If we look foolish, why not be a fool for Christ. I do think we should not be trying to get rejected, or on purpose looking foolish….that in itself would be foolish. But when we do share Christ, let’s make sure that we realize we could be changing someone’s whole destiny. Their life journey changes from bound for hell, to bound for glory! Our prayers for those pre-Christians really do have an effect. God can prepare the soil of their heart, to receive the Word that we will share with them. We can ask Him to remove blinders from their eyes so that they can see the goodness of God. The Bible does say that it is the goodness of God that draws men and women to salvation. Let’s do our part by praying for the lost to be saved.

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Does the list of things you need to pray for seem overwhelming, or even daunting? We are talking about the power of prayer, and I know in my own life, there are times when it feels like the list is so long, I don’t know where to start. I want to keep all of my bases covered, and make sure everything and everyone around me is covered in prayer, and that involves a lot of people! Just getting an opportunity to pray through the phone or mailing list from our own church body takes a very long time. Praying for my own family, then extended family, …..the list goes on and on and on. While I want to be praying for safety, protection, healing, or blessing for all of the long list, I have come to realize that the best prayer at the moment, is the one that is most needed at the moment. That is where I have the opportunity to be sensitive to the Spirit of God and tune in to what is most important at the moment. That is often called “Spirit directed prayer” and it is very helpful at all times, but especially when you don’t have an extended period of time to pray for a long list. Listen for cues, promptings from the Holy Spirit – they are supernatural urgings to pray for someone / something specifically. When you get a flash of someone’s face, or out of the blue think of someone- pray for them! Maybe even give them a call and find out if there is something specific you can be lifting up before God for them. Teach yourself to walk in the consciousness of God. God consciousness comes as we keep our eyes focused on Jesus throughout the day. Are you more God-conscious than you are conscious of your own self? Sometimes we look only in the natural when God says that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but are mighty in the realm of the spirit. Let’s be people of prayer who are sensitive to the voice of God, and listen when He speaks…..then obey.

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