As a Christian in today’s busy world, having a healthy prayer life can be very difficult. Taking the time to pray regularly often falls to the bottom of the to-do list. Even those of us who go to church every Sunday, attend Bible study, or belong to our church’s prayer team, don’t take time out of the day to have a one-on-one with the Lord.
Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.
~Jeremiah 29:12 ESV
A healthy prayer life is more than participating in prayer activities. While serving the church community in that way is a noble pursuit, it is not what is meant by prayer life. On the contrary, your prayer life is a much more personal connection to and relationship with God. It’s your 24-hour, open line of communication to God, no operator needed, where you call on God, talk to God, listen to God, thank God, love God, and embrace God as an integral part of your life.
But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
~Matthew 6:6 ESV
A healthy prayer life shows you that God is not just out there for others, but within you for you. Once you accept God in this way, your prayer life, along with reading of scripture, becomes your foundation for growth in Jesus Christ.
Keeping a journal to write down your thoughts and prayers is a great way to build on that foundation. By writing your thoughts, you clarify your intentions, desires, and needs to be sure they align with God’s will for you. Here are six ways that keeping a journal helps your prayer life:
- Journaling enables you to feel and see your emotions through an honest, godly lens. Sometimes just getting the thoughts out of your head and on paper gives us the vision to see how aligned or not we are with God’s teachings.
- Writing in your journal enables you to see God’s goodness and grace and recognize God’s gifts to you, even when they don’t quite make sense at the time. Many of us have experienced days that we thought were the worst, only to realize later that God was directing our steps and gifting us with His guidance.
- Keeping a journal gives you the opportunity to reflect on your growth when you look back at your journal writings from the past. The words your write in your journal today often turn out to be lessons for tomorrow. In reading and understanding those lessons, we see how far we have come in our faith.
- Journaling reveals to you a more spiritual perspective within your worldly experiences. When we look at life with a worldly, humanistic view, we are often disappointed. Writing out our worldly experiences, then looking at them from a godly perspective, we can see God at work in all of it.
- Journal writing helps you quiet your mind and connect yourself to God’s love. An anxious, busy mind benefits greatly from taking time to be still and know God, to write down what comes to mind when we listen and connect to Him.
- Writing in your journal gives you insights and wisdom from God that you may have missed if you didn’t take time to write in your journal. God speaks to us in so many ways, and your journal is the perfect place to gather and put on paper the inspirations that God shares with you in dreams and random thoughts.
Pray without ceasing
~1 Thessalonians 5:17 ESV
Living a life of prayer keeps you constantly in contact with and connected to the Lord. Keeping a journal supports that prayer life and demonstrates your trust and faith in God. He is ever-present, we need only to take the time to be with Him.
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Grace and Faith Press offers journals, with beautiful Christian-themed covers with 150 interior lined pages, where you can write your thoughts and prayers in whatever format you choose. See our collection of journals here.
