Who or What are you praying for?

David Powlison helps us think through “Who or What are you praying for?” as we get a new week started. In David’s outstanding book Safe and Sound: Standing Firm in Spiritual Battles, David writes in chapter four about prayer. He calls prayer a vital part of our daily battle to honor God in everything that we do. He provides the following ideas on how to pray at all times for every saint as it says in Ephesians 6. I found this helpful and thought you might as well as you get your day and new week started.

• Pray for your friends and family. The people you are most connected to need the Lord to directly impart his strength for them to be able to walk in faith and love. What part of the armor of Christ do each of them need the most today? Pray that the Spirit would clothe them with Christ. Pray that their eyes would be open to their need for Christ.
• Pray for those you counsel. Pray that they would be drawn to a living dependence on Christ. That the strength and love of Christ would flow into their lives and flow toward others. Pray for their faith – that they would have ears to hear and eyes to see the love of God for them in Christ.
• Take the truth that has most struck you as you’ve been reading and pray for the Spirit to make this truth alive in your life. Now pray that it would also be alive in your pastor’s life. Leadership is a very hard calling, and your leaders need much grace. If you are a pastor, pray for other pastors and leaders that you know.
• Pray for fellow Christians who either ignore spiritual warfare or exaggerate it. It is so important to get this right. We as God’s children need to live in the real world – neither half asleep nor in a fantasy world.
• Ask others to pray for you. Paul knew he needed God to give him the words to say and the boldness to say it. What do you specifically need that only the Lord can give? Isn’t it marvelous that the author of the New Testament’s most exalted letter can include this request, Make supplication for all the saints, and also for me?!

Consider these few bullet points and apply them or change them some so that you can in your own life related to you, your family, your friends, your coworkers, your church family, and your pastor.