Day 4
Saturday, March 8th
Scripture Prayers
Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the centre of your life.
(Philippians 4:6-7 MSG)
The wonderful thing about praying is that you leave a world of not being able to do something, and enter God's realm where everything is possible. He specializes in the impossible. Nothing is too great for His almighty power. Nothing is too small for His love.
-Corrie Ten Boom
We all have people in our lives we fret and worry about. It’s difficult to watch when the people we love are in pain, making poor choices, hurting themselves and others, or living in a state of perpetual discouragement. For these 40 days, we will be practicing “shaping your worries into prayers”.
Each Saturday, you will find a Scripture-filled prayer for you to follow, with blanks that you will fill with the person’s name or pronoun. You can pray this prayer out loud or in your head, whatever you are most comfortable with. Remember, there is no right or wrong way to do this. The Scripture prayers will only appear on Saturdays, but I encourage you, at the beginning of each new week, to look ahead to the Saturday Scripture prayer and begin praying it every day.
Scripture is the framework for these prayers because God’s words aren’t like other words. The Bible says God’s Word is “alive and active” (Hebrews 4:12 ), “always produces fruit”, and always “accomplishes what God wants it to… prospering everywhere it goes” (Isaiah 55:11). Praying the Scriptures helps us when we don’t know exactly what to pray for, or when the burden for a loved one is so heavy it seems beyond words. Praying the Words of God gives us confidence that we are praying according to God’s will and not according to our own limited, human understanding. God’s ways are not our ways. He doesn’t necessarily give us what we want, but He always gives us what we need. We can trust that God will do what is best in our loved one’s life.
Take those few minutes a day to pray the Words of God for your loved one. I am believing that as we pray over the next 40 days, God will do miracles in the lives of the people we are praying for.
Ask God to bring you the name of one person to pray for during these 40 days together. Likely, the name or face of someone will come to mind immediately.
I commit to praying for (name:) _____________ for these 40 days.