How to Pray with More Purpose

There is one thing I know to be true in life and that is that when you pray, things change. Setting aside time to be alone with God has done wonders for my personal relationship with Him. When I first got serious about my prayer life, it felt awkward. There I was alone in my room on the floor trying to figure out what to say. What was I supposed to pray for? What could I possibly say that He didn’t already know? I mean God is all knowing. After about a week of these awkward super short prayer sessions, I realized I needed a bit more guidance when it comes to praying. Which is crazy to think about because I grew up in church. I should know how to pray right? Not exactly.

It’s one thing to understand the mechanics of prayer. It’s an entirely different thing to employ prayer as a strategy for productive, Christ-like living.

Around this time, I stumbled upon the book Fervent by Priscilla Shirer. Just when I was searching for a guideline on how to pray, one seemed to drop from the sky. Isn’t God funny that way? This book drastically changed the way I pray. Priscilla gives so many great tips on how to engage in “serious, specific and strategic prayer” that I would do you a disservice by trying to sum up the whole book in a 500-word blog post. So, I won’t! Instead I am sharing the biggest takeaway from the book that allowed me to go from 5-minute vague prayer sessions to 30 minutes of purposeful prayers. So here we go. Are you ready?

The number one way to pray with more purpose is to understand who the real enemy is in your life.

To be clear, that enemy is Satan. For so many people (myself included) prayer is approached from a “woe is me” place. We go to God and complain about everything the world is doing wrong to us. Depending on the severity of the pain we are feeling, we may even blame God himself. But how often do we stop and say maybe there’s more going on here?

We know that Satan wants to weaken our relationships with God because he knows that’s where we get our spiritual strength. If we are weak spiritually, he can create all kinds of trouble in our lives. That’s why knowing the true enemy is so important. Because when you know who you’re fighting, you can study their strategies and create your own plan of counterattack. Which leads me back to the book. In Fervent, after outlining who the real enemy is, Priscilla goes to work detailing exactly what Satan’s strategies are, how he preys on our families, our identity, our fears and so much more in an effort to break us down. But we aren’t defenseless against him. Our biggest weapon to fight back? You guessed it. Prayer!! Because once you know how you will be attacked, you know specifically what to pray for. And that my friends is when we start to pray with purpose.