Struggling in Prayer? Here’s the Hope (and Help) You Need

My friend is lost. And I don’t know how to pray for him.

In fact, I don’t even know what to pray.

If we’re honest, most of us would say we have similar struggles in prayer. So instead of praying for a specific person or situation, we either pray only for ourselves and our own needs.

Or, worse, we don’t pray at all.

But not knowing how or what to pray, Jon Graf says, is the very time we need to do so.

“I’ve found that the longer somebody prays over a topic where they come back to it and come back to it, what happens is they get God’s heart for that topic,” the president of the Church Prayer Leaders Network tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network.

“God starts to infuse them with His heart for that person or that situation,” Graf says. “And then a lot of times, as we pray more for something, and we get God’s heart, God begins to move and nudge us to become the answer to our prayers.”

The person who didn’t know how to pray for his lost friend often becomes the one who decides, “I’m going to share my faith,” or “I’m going to help my neighbor” after taking the step to pray, Graf says.

“And so that really is the ultimate of what we’re looking for: that we get people praying on something,” he explains. “We help them to pray with more Scripture and more faith, and then God starts to do the work in their heart, and they start to become the answer.

“How many people do you know who were praying for a nation and all of a sudden decided to take a prayer journey to that nation or mission trip?” Graf asks. “That’s what happens. … And so that’s what we’re trying to do.”

For more from Jon Graf on how God can use us as the answer to our own prayers, listen to the entire episode of the Greenelines podcast here. Be sure to subscribe to Greenelines on your favorite platform. And check out the latest book from Jon Graf and PrayerShop Publishing, Make Us One, as well as his powerful podcast, Pray Beyond, on the Charisma Podcast Network. {eoa}

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