Recently, I felt the Holy Spirit leading me to do something I
have never really done before concerning prayer.  I am not
suggesting the Lord hasn't approached me with this idea before and
I really never said no about it to the Lord but I never said yes
either.  This week, I said yes.

     I currently have about 60 people I pray for each day.  This
list grows a little at a time.  This does not include prayer
requests these same people call and ask me to put on my prayer
list.  These are just 60 people for whom I pray each and every
day.  How I pray for them is first in tongues.  Why in tongues?
Well, although many believe the gift of tongues has passed away
with the last apostle, whoever he was, I still use it anyhow
because I learned, by my own personal study of God's Word, the
gift is still viable for today's New Testament Christian.  So,
regardless of what others believe, I pray in tongues out loud.
This form of prayer allows me to spiritually focus on an
individual and to do spiritual warfare for them at the same time.
I could go into more detail about this but my website has bunches
of articles, rebuttals, and booklets I have written on this topic
so there is little reason to reproduce that effort of theological
explanation here.  It is, however, the second aspect of my prayer
time which has changed.

     I used to keep my prayer time restricted to 30 minutes so
that means, everyone for whom I prayed, was crammed into that time
frame.  As my list grew, however, I realize how little time I was
spending praying for each person.  So I expanded my prayer time to
40 minutes each day and more than half the time, it would end up
going for an hour.  I was always timing myself with the stop watch
feature on my watch to keep track of my progress.  That got to
bothering me, for some reason, so I approached the Lord for the
solution.

     The Lord told me to stop timing my prayer times.  "And do
what?" I wondered.  He said, "Just pray for each person and each
request until you feel you have prayed enough.  Then move to the
next person in line."  Simple enough, of course, but this could
mean I would end up praying much longer.  Regardless, I stopped
timing myself and now I pray as I was instructed.  No, I have
absolutely no idea how long I pray each day now.  I just pray
until I am done.  This solved two major problems for me.  Now I
don't worry if I have prayed long enough for each person and it
doesn't bother me, that just maybe, I haven't prayed long enough
to please God.

Phil.


I Flew Kites With Jesus
www.SafePlaceFellowship.com