People communicate with God using different methods: journaling, praying out loud, praying silently in their thoughts and out loud with others. We encourage you to practice different types of prayer and learn what works best for you. He hears you whenever you reach out to Him, regardless of how you do it. Talk to Jesus as you talk to a friend; He wants you to be open and honest with Him about all aspects of your life. Being in constant conversation with Him means both speaking to Him and providing space for Him to speak to you.
Ways to Pray:
Consider using the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) as a model for your prayer time. Pray the prayer and ask the Lord show you what His will is for you. What does he want you to surrender, pray for, give thanks for.
Another method of prayer some choose to use is the acronym ACTS to shape their conversations with God:
o Adoration – Adoration is about praising God for who He is and what he has done. The book of Psalms will give you great examples, but it’s also reflected in the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father in heaven hallowed be your name...”
o Confession – Confession is about bringing our life into alignment with how God has called us to live. We need to approach God with a clean heart. Confession is about allowing God to set us free. Psalm 51 gives us a great guide on how to confess.
o Thanksgiving – You may have heard it said, “count your blessings”. So often in our lives we can lose sight of all God has done for us, but when begin to see God’s abundant blessing, it changes the posture of our hearts. So, keep a list of God’s blessings – the sunrise, health, family, the cup of coffee, etc...
o Supplication – Supplication is about making the requests of our hearts known to God. Jesus commands us to “ask, seek and knock” (Matthew 7:7-8) emphasizing our freedom to ask God to meet our needs. The Apostle Paul in Philippians 4:6 encourages us not to be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
3. Listening prayer. For many, listening to what God has to say is more of a struggle than telling Him what you want Him to know. However, practice being quiet with Him in order to hear what He has for you. Like talking to God, listening to Him can take many forms. Some might spend this quiet time with Him on a drive, some take walks, some sit in nature. Whatever this looks like for you, practice quieting your mind and opening your heart to Him.
Fasting:
The Bible refers to fasting as abstaining from food for spiritual purposes. We live in a world today where everything is at our fingertips and that can make the idea of abstaining from anything, much less something we need (like food), really hard to wrap our minds around. It’s easy for us to see the value in a spiritual practice like prayer or studying scripture...it’s much harder to understand how something like fasting makes sense. Acknowledging this, the question becomes: is this really something God wants us to do? Is it a necessary part of our walk with the Lord? Is fasting Biblical? Perhaps the most convincing depiction that fasting is something expected as we walk with the Lord is the way Jesus talks about it in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew chapter 6:16 Jesus says the words, “When you fast” and then follows it with instruction. He doesn’t say “if you fast”. He was assuming that the children of His kingdom would be doing it and was giving instruction on how it could be done with spiritual success.
