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How to Pray for Anyone and Everyone
by Steve May
Text: Philippians 1:3-11
Topic: How to pray effectively for others
Big Idea: Prayer is not just a religious ritual; it is a matter of the heart.
Keywords: Prayer; Prayer, intercessory
Introduction:
- Illustration: May shares his own experience with devising a massive prayer list and attempting to pray for everyone on it, including the frustration of not knowing how to pray for many of the people, save to ask God to “bless” them.
- In the first chapter of Philippians, the apostle Paul offers a blueprint we can use when we pray for people.
Make it a positive prayer.
- Philippians 1:3-4
- Whenever you pray for someone, begin by thanking God for them.
- Illustration: May tells a lengthy personal anecdote of praying with thanksgiving for a difficult person in a previous church and how that prayer reconciled their antagonistic relationship.
- Illustration: May quotes preacher George Buttrick: “Lord, bless so and so whom I foolishly regard as an enemy. Keep them in thy favor. Banish my resentment.”
- Philippians 1:6
- 2 Peter 3:18
- When you pray, make it a positive prayer—not because you have faith in that person, but because you have faith in God who never gives up on us.
Make it a personal prayer.
- Philippians 1:7
- When you pray for others, take time to reflect on how this person affects you personally, and what the relationship means to you.
- When you pray for people, you share your heart with them.
- Illustration: May demonstrates how he prays from the heart, even for people he doesn’t know, through his compassion for their struggles.
- Illustration: May briefly summarizes a story from the book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home about a woman who prays from the heart for 200 missionaries.
Make it a purpose-driven prayer.
- Philippians 1:9-11
- When you pray for someone to grow in love, wisdom, and holiness, you are giving them a very special gift.
- -A person whose “love abounds more and more” is a person
- who will be happy and have a rich, rewarding life.
- -A person who is growing in “knowledge and depth of
- insight” and is “able to discern what is best” is a
- person who has the wisdom to make clearheaded decisions
- at crucial points in their life.
- -A person who is “pure and blameless until the day of
- Christ” and is “filled with the righteousness that
- comes through Christ” is a person who is alive
- spiritually.
Conclusion:
- Big Idea: Prayer is not just a religious ritual; it is a matter of the heart.
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