Helpful Hints 3

JoHannah Reardon wrote an article at buildingsmallgroups.com about making our small group prayer time more meaningful. He talks about making our prayers more God-centered, praise-filled and life-changing. Here is how he begins his article.

We wrapped up our small group as we usually do, with a time for everyone to share their prayer requests. After we closed in prayer, Tom approached my husband and me. He was considering dropping out of our small group because he felt overwhelmed by the prayer requests. It seemed to him as though everyone's problems were insurmountable, and although we'd been praying for the same things for months, it didn't seem as though anyone's life was getting any better.

Tom's comment was a wake-up call about the way we handled the prayer time in our small group. My husband and I did some soul and Scripture searching to find out what we might be doing wrong. Nowhere in Scripture did we find prayers for Sally's arthritis, Mark's unruly children, or Bonnie's rotten work conditions. The prayers in the Bible were powerful and life-changing, full of God's power and glory.

. . . So should we ignore our problems and pretend they don't exist? Not at all. Instead, we should transform them by putting them into the bigger context of what God wants to do in our lives. We can still take the prayer requests, but consider praying for them in the following ways.

Click HERE to read the entire article - it isn't too long.