I'll Pray For You

The Lord invites us to come to Him and present our requests before Him - for ourselves, and for other people.  1st John 5 underscores the confidence we can have as we approach Him:

14Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.15And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.
Confidence - in prayer!   We can see God do great and mighty things in our midst as we seek His face, as we cry or call out to Him, and as we trust Him as we pray.   Our God has made Himself available to us - because He loves us.  So that He can display His glory through us in response to our petitions.  We can be confident that as we approach His throne, described in Hebrews 4 as the "throne of grace," He takes our prayers seriously.   And, I hope that each of us takes Him at His Word, and with a sense of devotion and awe, brings requests to Him - not just for ourselves, but for others, including those who have personally asked us to pray for them.

James 5 contains a very encouraging directive which illustrates for us how we as believers can be involved in interacting with one another:
16Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.

Four simple words.  Powerful.  A promise.

A piece in Converge magazine (see page 8) starts out by saying:

"I'll pray for you."

Four powerful, simple words, yet each time you speak them, you know that there's a good chance you won't put them into action.

The indictment continues:

...We use journals, spending hours writing and rewriting prayers.  We use Post-it notes until our desks are covered.  We create prayer lists, prayer chains, and still, there's a 99 percent chance we'll forget to actually pray.   

The piece introduces the Echo prayer app.  Its website, EchoPrayer.com, gives some history.   In 2006, Ben Rugg began to develop a prayer reminder service online to help him and him and his small group keep track of their prayer requests and remind them to pray for each other throughout the week. After working solely on this web-based service for three months, he launched Echo Prayer, which has grown to nearly 20,000 users around the world.

Rugg and Jim Elliston then co-founded Clover, which makes websites and provides donation tools for ministries and non-profit organizations, and intended to develop a more modern solution for 8 years.

Now, the Echo phone app is available.   Its website says:

Echo's number one goal is to help people pray.

Whether it be to simply keep track of prayer requests, give space to engage with God, or simply help remind people to pray... Echo is a tool to help Christ-followers engage with God.

I think there are some important takeaways for us here...first of all, people ask us to pray for them all the time, and we have to ask ourselves, do we actually pray when asked to?   And, do we even take that one step further and promise to pray, but don't keep the promise?    Quite frankly, that is an integrity issue that I have had to deal with personally.   We have to make sure we are engaged with prayer for one another, and to seek to be incredibly faithful when people share their needs with us.   The Echo app is a possible tool to us, but there are other ways we can be prompted to pray, as well.

Perhaps we can pray for someone at that moment, maybe even to pray for them on the spot.  If it's a personal conversation, taking a pause to petition Almighty God can be effective, and will activate the power of agreement.

I think it's also helpful to us to evaluate how seriously we believe in the power of prayer.  Seriously.  If we serve the God of the universe, and we do, and believe that He has infinite power, and desires to respond to our requests, then we can be confident when we go to Him.  We have to train ourselves to make prayer our first and preeminent option, rather than just one of many options or an afterthought - a last resort, if you will.   He invites us to earnestly come before His throne of grace to find mercy and grace to help in time of need.