“Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” (Luke 5:16)
In an earlier post entitled DAY OF PRAYER, I mentioned that January is a good time as any to spend a day in prayer in order to discern God’s specific will for you to govern what you ought to focus on for the year that is unfolding.
Those who are mature disciples of Christ have no difficulty managing their extended time of quiet with the Lord. But for those who are just starting their walk with the Lord, or who have never experienced spending as much as 4 hours or even longer in quiet time with the Lord, they may struggle to keep focused, or to feel they are making productive use of their time. Although there is really no single prescribed way to spend in extended prayer, allow me to share with you some tips that I hope will help you have a fruitful and Spirit-filled day of prayer.
For this purpose, I find helpful a post entitled “How to Have a Half Day of Prayer with God” by Chris Russell, a Pastor from Veritas Church. He suggests that you structure your day of prayer into two parts, (a) speaking to God and (b) listening to God. I like this because it is a very simple and practical way to approach your day of prayer yet it covers essential ground. I shall briefly describe these parts below, and provide links to additional readings for those who need greater detail.
Considering the two-part day of prayer, while I don’t want this to sound too mechanical a process, it serves us well to follow a simple pattern such as this in order to avoid random thoughts from hijacking your prayer time. It also provides us a way to ensure that there is balance and purposefulness in what you will be doing, while at the same time leaving room for the Holy Spirit to move as He wills. And hopefully you will see that it is simple enough so that you don’t get bogged down with the burden of trying to be compliant with every single step for the sake of mere compliance.
SOME GENERAL SUGGESTIONS
Before I go into details about these two parts of your day of prayer, let me suggest the following:
- It will be good to invite other friends, fellow disciples, to join you in this day of prayer, with each of you following this prescribed approach. This way you can minister to one another at the end of your respective prayer times, have a discernment and prayer partner to help you process your thoughts, and hold yourself accountable to each other to later on fulfill whatever it is that God desires for you to do specifically within the course of the year.
- Before coming to the day of prayer, solicit from your friends and loved ones their own personal prayer requests which you will offer to pray for during this day of prayer. Ask them to put this in writing so that you can bring these prayer slips with you.
- I also highly recommend that you accompany your prayer with some form of fasting. There is much virtue and value to fasting as a form of purification and commitment.
- Bring your bible, and a pen and a notebook to write down your thoughts, prayers and discernments as the day moves along.
- You need to pick a quiet place where you will spend your day. Protect this day of prayer from public and private distractions, other preoccupations and interruptions.
- Ensure that you are well rested coming into this day of prayer. Staying mentally focused the whole day can be physically and emotionally tiring. So make sure you’ve saved up enough energy for this endeavor.
THE TWO PARTS, in summary
PART 1. SPEAKING TO GOD — Russell prescribes a method of speaking to God in prayer commonly known by the A-C-T-S acronym. These letters stand for A-doration, C-ontrition, T-hanksgiving, and S-upplication. In that part about supplication, I’ve added also a simple way of sequencing our prayers using the five fingers in our hands as a guide. Specifically and in sequence, we want to pray for those who are near and dear to us, for those who accompany us and help us, for those who are above us, for those who are weak, and finally for our own personal concerns. The idea in this part about speaking to God is to be intentional, to be thorough, and to be specific. I also suggest reviewing another post that I wrote entitled “YOUR OWN ‘BAHALA KA NA, LORD’ PRAYER“.
PART 2. LISTENING TO GOD — This part involves taking what we have put together in Part 1 (namely our prayers of confession, thanksgiving and supplications), and with the use of scripture, we go into deep reflection to listen in silence to what God has to say to us. I propose that we spend time reflecting on two general areas: (a) what God is saying and revealing about Himself, and (b) what God is saying and revealing about our self, and about the situation(s) that we face. We use this time to discern what God is doing in our lives, and how He wants us to cooperate in fulfilling His purpose for us, either for our personal transformation towards holiness, for the mission of bringing God’s kingdom to others, and/or with regards our specific life challenges which we have brought to Him.
To learn more about how to go about these two parts, click on the links below:
Very helpful suggestion on how to go about DOP. Thank you Tito Eddie.
Thank you so much Tito Eddie. I will share it here in Austin, Texas.