Apprentice

Organising my prayers was one of the first problems I encountered was sorting out the tangled mess of thoughts and ideas I have stored in my head into an actual prayer. I mean what do you say to God?

Bill Hybel’s book “Too Busy not to Pray” helped me a lot in organising my prayers back when I bought it shortly after coming to faith. The book uses the well known acronym “ACTS” as a pattern for prayer: Adoration first, then Confession, then Thanksgiving and finally Supplication. This is used by a lot of people and it has helped me greatly in my own prayer life, it has it’s drawbacks though so I’m going to try changing to a different pattern.

One of the areas I had problems with was the Adoration section of prayer and how it was separate from Thanksgiving. I naturally wanted to thank God, while I was praising him during Adoration. The Confession section also had it’s drawbacks because after confessing a sin I would naturally want to ask God for help in that area, but supplication was to be left for the Supplication section. I know it would be perfectly acceptable to have some overlap and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing but I would like to try out another pattern to see if it would be more natural for me. ACTS is a great pattern and I would recommend it for anyone needing some kind of structure for their payers but it is not the only pattern out there.

The new pattern I will be trying out (starting in the morning) is simpler and has much broader sections: my prayers will first start out by focusing on God (which covers adoration and much of thanksgiving) , then I focus on myself (confession, some supplication and perhaps some thanksgiving for the ways God has blessed me), finally I focus my prayers on other people (supplication and perhaps thanksgiving for others).

Following a pattern for my prayer ensures I keep a balanced prayer life instead of working only on what I enjoy or find easy and ignoring the more difficult aspects.