This is Pastor Rick Warren’s Daily Hope. If you’re new, we’re so glad you found us. And if you’re a daily, daily hoper, welcome back.
Today, we’re going to continue with our series called 40 Days of Prayer. Such a great series because Rick is going to help you cultivate a powerful prayer life, so you can experience breakthroughs. Breakthroughs in your relationships, breakthroughs in finances, health, and really every area of your life.
So don’t miss a day of this life-changing series. And now Pastor Rick with part one of a message called How to Pray Throughout Your Day.
When you look at Paul, it’s real obvious that Paul prayed all the time. And in every book, he starts with a prayer, as he writes most of the New Testament. And he says, I’m always praying.
I’m continually praying. I’m constantly praying. I’m praying without ceasing.
I never stop praying for you. He’s always, always praying. How do you do that?
How do you pray without ceasing? How do you continually pray without stopping? In Ephesians, there at the top of your outline, Ephesians chapter six, verse 18, it says this.
Pray in the Spirit at all times, with all kinds of prayers, asking for everything you need. Now to do this, you must always be ready and never give up, and always pray for all of God’s people. Now, in that one verse, he gives us seven instructions.
Let me just point them out real quick. First he says, I want you to pray in the Spirit. He starts by saying, pray in the Spirit.
What does that mean? It just means let God lead you. Listen to impressions.
If all of a sudden somebody puts in your mind, somebody, the image of them is put in your mind, pray for them. You get an idea? Pray about it.
You think about something? Pray about it. When the Holy Spirit puts an idea in your mind, stop and pray about it.
Don’t say, I’ll pray about it later. Do it right then. Follow the Spirit’s leading.
It’s always good to listen to what God is saying to you. So he says, pray in the Spirit, and then he says, at all times. There is no bad time to pray.
There’s never an inappropriate time to pray. Every time, anywhere, you can pray. All the time.
And then he says, because it’s always a good idea to pray, and he says, pray with all kinds of prayer. Did you know that there are different kinds of prayer? There are many, many different kinds of praying.
There’s not just one right way to pray. There are lots of kinds of prayers, depending on your emotion and depending on the circumstance. And if you want a good example of it, look at the Book of Psalms.
In the Book of Psalms, there’s a prayer for every emotion known to man. There are complaining prayers. There are crying out prayers.
There are comforting prayers. There are clarifying prayers. There are courageous prayers.
There are confessing prayers. There are celebrating prayers when you’re happy. The Book of Psalms, 150 chapters, it’s right in the middle of your Bible.
If you open up in the middle, there’s where it is. It’s the Book of Prayers and Songs. And there’s a prayer for every emotion known to man.
And for thousands of years, people have prayed the Psalms. If you want to learn how to pray, just read the Psalms. Say, Lord, make this my prayer.
And let it be your prayer. But there’s a prayer for all times, and there are prayers for all emotions, and there are prayers for all kinds of situations. So he says, pray in the Spirit, pray at all times, pray all kinds of prayers, asking for everything you need.
What does that mean? There are no subjects off limit. There is nothing that you cannot pray about.
If you’re interested in it, God’s interested in it. If you worry about it, pray about it. If you prayed as much as you worried, you’d have a lot less to worry about.
Worry never changes anything, but prayer can change things. So when you start to pray, start to worry, just stop and say, well, if I’m worried about it, I may as well pray about it. He says you can pray about everything, nothing is off limits.
You can pray about physical issues, mental issues. You can pray about financial issues, sexual issues. You can pray about relational issues, career issues, political issues.
There is nothing off limits. He says pray all the time, pray in all the different ways, pray wherever you are, pray whatever you’re interested in, pray about everything. And then he says, number five, he says always be ready.
He says if you’re gonna pray all the time to do this, you have to always be ready. What does ready mean? It means you gotta have a plan.
That’s what we’re gonna talk about today. How do you plan your prayers? spontaneous prayers are great.
spontaneous prayers are good. spontaneous prayers are what you need to do in the moment. But the Bible says you also need to plan your prayers.
You need to think them out. You need to be strategic. You need to prepare.
You need to think through when you wanna pray, where you wanna pray. You gotta have a plan. You have to be prepared if you’re gonna be ready.
And then he says, to do this, you must always be ready and never give up, which means to never stop praying. And finally he says, and always pray for all of God’s people, which means you’re supposed to pray for everybody. I can’t do that if I only pray two minutes a day.
I gotta pray throughout the day. How do I do this? That’s what I want us to look at this weekend.
How do I pray throughout my day? Well, there’s two different ways. I want you to write these down.
Two different ways that you can pray throughout your day. The first is just to keep a running conversation with God. And you just talk to God like I’m talking to you, like you talk to anybody else.
You just keep a running conversation with God. You don’t end the prayer. You don’t say in jesus’ name, amen.
You just talk. And if something comes up, you talk to God about it. And then maybe a minute or two goes by, and then you talk about something else.
And it’s kind of like breathing. You don’t think about breathing. You just do it.
And if you did not breathe, you die. Prayer is spiritual breathing. Prayer is to your soul what breathing is to your body.
And it needs to become as natural so that you don’t even think about it. Right now, you probably have to think to pray. But you can actually develop a habit, like I have done and many, many people have done, where I don’t even think about it when I’m praying.
I just, instead of talking to myself, I talk to God all the time. Now, you talk to yourself all the time. You know that.
You are your biggest fan. And no matter what happens to you, and you feel it, taste it, touch it, smell it, you know, sense it, you talk to yourself about everything you experience in life. Well, it’s not that hard to just kind of make a switch where instead of talking to yourself all the time, you talk to God all the time.
And that’s the kind of conversation, you just, you drive in the car, you go through a car wash, you walk through a grocery store, you pick up some trash, you deliver some mail, or whatever you do, you can just talk to God all the time. It’s conversational praying. Now, to pray conversationally, what do you do?
You just talk to God about whatever you’re interested in at that particular moment. It’s not formal, it’s just like, I’m watching TV, I talk to God about what I’m watching. Do you think that was funny, God?
I didn’t, you know, and you can just, you know, you’re watching some western, you go, man, that’s a beautiful place. God, that was really cool. You made that monument valley out there in Arizona.
The Bible says in Ephesians 5, 6, 18, pray on every occasion as the spirit leads. On every occasion means, as I said, you can talk to God anywhere, anytime, about anything, all the time. As the spirit leads, when you get an impression, you pray about it.
Now, here’s what I’ve noticed. I just wrote this down this week. I don’t think I’d ever thought about it.
If I don’t feel like praying, it means I’m praying, I’m not praying what I feel. Let me say that again. If I don’t feel like praying, I’m not praying what I feel.
If the only time you pray is when you pray stuff you think God wants to hear, well, that’s boring. But if you pray about what you’re feeling right now, nervousness or anxiety or your stomach’s upset or you’re frustrated or you’re tired, and you just talk to God about it, when you talk to God about what you feel, then you’re gonna feel like praying. When you don’t feel like praying, it means you’re praying about the wrong thing.
God isn’t interested in what you’re not interested in. God already knows everything in your life. He just wants you to talk, just like a father or a mother longs to have their children talk to them.
You long for your children to grow up to the day that they can talk to you and have an intelligent conversation, and frankly, it doesn’t matter what to talk about. You just like having their attention and listening to them. And so, you keep a running conversation with God.
And if you don’t feel like praying, it means you’re not praying what you feel. 1 Thessalonians 5.17 says never stop praying. In other words, pray all the time.
Well, one of the ways to keep a running conversation, the other way, write this down, is to schedule prayer times throughout my day. And I’m gonna teach you a very, very simple way to do this this weekend. Schedule prayer times throughout my day.
Now, this is not some new idea. From the beginning of time, people have scheduled their prayer times. The Jews in the Old Testament scheduled their prayer times.
They set times, there were fixed hours. The Bible tells us, and Daniel will remember when we studied that great character, he said, it said he kneeled in prayer three times a day. Morning, noon, and night.
He kneeled three times a day. But what really happened was something that happened during the Roman Empire. And when the Romans took over the known world at that time, one of the things they did is they would build a forum in every major city, and in that forum, they would put up a bell tower.
And the Roman bell tower would ring about six or seven times a day. It would ring first at about 6.30 in the morning. And that was called prime, or the first hour.
It meant everybody get to work. It was the alarm clock that says, work has now started in this city at about six, 6:30 a.m. About nine a.m., the bell would ring again. That was about three hours later, so it was called the third hour.
The third hour. When you read the Bible, it talks about when jesus sung on the cross from the sixth hour. And it talks about the ninth hour and the third hour.
You find it all through the Bible. They’re using Roman legion terms. Prime was about six o’clock.
Nine o’clock was the third hour. Twelve o’clock noon was the sixth hour of the day. And there was a lunch break.
And here’s the cool thing. In the Roman Empire, the lunch break lasted till 3 p.m. It was a three-hour lunch break. Now, that’s the good news.
The other point was you didn’t get to go home to about 6.30. So at noon, the bell would ring again. And then it would ring again at three in the afternoon.
And then it would ring again at about 6 p.m. in the evening, which meant work’s over, go home. Now, everybody could hear these bells, and the Romans had these going for hundreds of years. So you know what happened?
The Jews and the Christians started using the Roman bells for the times of prayer. And they developed a habit of praying every time those bells rang, and that’s called the Liturgy of the Hours. And even today, Catholic Church has the Liturgy of the Hours, and they still use the Roman terms that the Romans gave, the third hour and the sixth hour and the ninth hour, and you know, Vespers and prime and the different kinds of words that are used for the prayers throughout the day.
Now, what’s interesting is over time, the monks who were having monasteries started putting their own bells in the monasteries. That’s why they had bell towers. And they would ring the bells, because then it meant it’s time to pray again, another three hours, another three hours, another three, time to pray again.
In fact, in the 1400s, the monks started thinking, you know what, this is a bad deal where we always have to have one guy right there ready to ring the bell. So, they started creating mechanical instruments that would ring the bells on schedule. And the Latin word for bell is clock.
You ever heard of that? You didn’t know this. Clocks were invented to make time for prayer.
It’s the whole reason we have clocks. The clock was not invented to make life speedier, to make life rush. Everybody has secularized.
We now have watches and all kinds of timepieces. But the clock was invented for worship. So that everybody would know, it’s time to pray, it’s time to pray, it’s time to pray.
And the word clock, as I said, is the Latin word, or cloaca is the word for bell. Now, in Psalm 119 verse 164, there in your outline, David says, seven times a day I pray to you. And over the centuries, these daily times of prayer throughout the day began to be known, as I said, the liturgy of the hours or divine office.
It got very, very complicated. And I would not recommend, in fact, I have the volumes that are literally thousands of pages for the liturgy of the hours. It’s about that thick, it’s four volumes, about that tall, and it’s very, very complicated.
I wanna teach you something far simpler. Far, far simpler that you could memorize and you can use. It’s something I created based on the seven phrases of the Lord’s Prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer is not simply a prayer to be prayed. It is a model for life. In fact, when jesus gave the Lord’s Prayer, he said, you should pray like this.
Notice, he didn’t say, you should pray this. He said, you should pray like this. Nowhere in the Bible are you commanded to recite the Lord’s Prayer.
In fact, God says, multiple times in scripture, don’t say something over and over and over that becomes a vain repetition, you don’t even think about it. But we typically take a model and make it a recipe. But God in the Bible never says, the Lord’s Prayer is something you should pray over and over and over.
Never says it. He says, this is a model. This is a pattern.
This is how you should pray, not what you should pray. And so I want us to take a typical day in your life, and I want to show you how starting in the morning, when you get up, and then breakfast, and then midday, and then at noon, and then in the afternoon, and then in the evening, and before you go to bed, you could use the seven phrases of the Lord’s Prayer just to remember, oh, I should talk to God right now, whether it’s 30 seconds, or a minute, or five minutes, or however much time you put into it. It’s a simple pattern that you can use.
All right, let’s get right into it. Number one, we’re gonna start your day with the first phrase of Lord’s Prayer. And the first thing you do when you wake up, here’s what you do, write it down.
First thing when you wake up, get up with gratitude. Get up with gratitude. When you get out of bed in the morning, before you eat breakfast or anything else, you should get up starting to be grateful to God and telling God all the things you’re grateful for.
Now, you’ve got a choice on what attitude you’re going to have when you get up. One guy said, you wake up grumpy in the morning? He said, no, I usually let her sleep.
You can get up with grumbling. You can get up with griping. You can get up with groaning.
You can get up with grousing. You can get up with grumbling. You can get up with growling.
You can get up with grunting. Or you can get up with gratitude. It’s your choice.
Did you know that doctors have discovered that the single healthiest emotion known to man is gratitude? That the attitude of gratitude actually makes you healthier mentally, emotionally, and physically. It’s actually good for your health.
And so why not start every morning with gratitude to God? And you thank God for all the things that he has done for you. And what I would recommend you do is that you keep a gratitude list by your nightstand.
And when you, but you don’t have anything memorized. I’ve got mine memorized, A to Z, and stuff I’m grateful for. But you could get up in the morning, and before you get out of bed, you stop there and say, let me just be grateful, God, for some things.
And you can read some stuff off of it. D, you designed my life, your great plan and purpose. Thanks, God.
E, you empower me with your spirit. F, you forgive me and you forget my sins. You free me from shame and you fill my life with meaning.
Boom. You could just read through this list. It will change your attitude.
Doctors and actually psychologists have proven that the attitude that you have for the day is set in the first eight minutes. So you want to grumble, grouse, groan, grunt, or do you want to be grateful? So you start your day with gratitude to God for the goodness of God.
And one of the ways is just to use this little tool to make a list of stuff you’re grateful for. Another way is just to make a playlist of songs of gratitude. Thank you songs to God.
You can go on Spotify or iTunes or something and make a list of songs that say thank you to God, and you can play those. And so you get up with gratitude and you wake up with worship. That will set your attitude for the whole day.
Very, very simple. You start with that. Now why do we do this?
Look up here on the screen. The Bible says this. What do you have that God didn’t give you?
Everything you have is a gift from God. And if it was given to you, how can you brag about it? So really, what gratitude does is it gets me to focus.
On the loving father that we talked about last week, the Abba, the daddy, the papa, who gives me all that I need, who meets all my needs. And so you start your day focusing on the goodness of God. And that’s the first phrase of the Lord’s Prayer.
Look at this, Matthew 6, verse 8 and 9. jesus said, you know, your father knows what you need before you ask him. You know that when you pray.
Your father knows what you need before you ask him. So then, this is how you should pray. Our Father in Heaven.
He says start with thinking about God and his goodness. He’s a good, good father. Yes you are, yes you are.
He’s a good, good father. He’s caring, he’s close, he’s consistent, he’s competent. God, you’re a good, good father.
And let me give you a list of the ways that you’re good to me. And so you start your day not with confession, not with your request, you start it with gratitude. God, you’re a good, good father.
Let me just tell you all the things I’m grateful for. You know what, I’m grateful for running water. I’m grateful for indoor plumbing.
I’m grateful for ice. I’m grateful for bed and sheets and a blanket. I’m grateful for shoes to put on.
I’m grateful for a warm house when it’s cold and a cold house when it’s hot outside. And you just tell God all the stuff you’re grateful for and you take for granted. He says you start with our Father.
James 1.17. Every good gift and every perfect present comes from the Father, your Father of light in heaven.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope. I hope you were as blessed as I was from today’s show. And now, here’s Rick to tell you about today’s offer.
You know, we hear a lot about the importance of prayer, but we don’t often understand how prayer works. I’ve put together a brand new six-part Bible study. It’s called 40 Days of Prayer.
Now, this study is going to show you that really prayer is about a relationship, not fancy formulas. It’s about getting to know God on a personal basis and realizing how deeply he wants to hear you talk to him and he wants to talk to you back. You’ll stop worrying and you’ll start trusting more.
You’ll pray with more confidence. You’ll claim his promises, and you’ll see answers to your prayer. So join me and a lot of other Daily Hope listeners all over the world as we unite together.
We’ll be praying with you and for you. You’ll be praying as we spend 40 days in learning how to pray consistently and persistently and effectively and expectantly and successfully. Get this resource.
You can only get it through Daily Hope. God bless you.
just go to pastorrick.com to get your copy of this great resource. That’s pastorrick.com or just text the word HOPE to 70309. That’s the word HOPE to 70309.
And thanks so much for your support, your gift to Daily Hope really helps us share the hope of Christ with people everywhere. Be sure to join us next time as we look into God’s Word for our Daily Hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope and your generous financial support.
