Praying is one of the most important things you can do for your children. Children who don't have the support of their parent's prayers may struggle all their lives to know God and walk in His will. Even worse, they may never find it.
But children whose lives are bathed in the daily prayers of their parents are on a path for a totally different outcome. A parent's prayers can be the very thing that empowers a child to make correct decisions.
Daily petitions before God can make the difference in them being strong when peer pressure would otherwise persuade them to make the wrong decisions or follow the wrong crowd.
Vague, general prayers will not bring this kind of success in parenting. As parents, we are to pray with purpose and power, presenting specific requests to God. God has given us His detailed handbook that contains the answers we need. Settle this beyond any shadow of a doubt:
You have an audience with God. He cares about your needs. And He has the answers that are suitable both for your situation and for whatever your children are facing.
The Power of Praying God's Word
One of the most effective ways I have found to pray is to pray God's Word over my family.
Dennis and I were still babies in our walk of faith when we first discovered the power of praying God's Word.
At that time in our marriage, I was a mess. I had a chip on my shoulder and was angry at everybody. Shyness tormented me. I could not speak to people and would never give my opinion on anything. I had never felt loved and didn't know how to love or how to receive love.
Before I met Dennis, I had never experienced love. And even after marriage, I didn't trust Dennis. I lived in depression and isolation. What I had kept hidden from Dennis before our marriage became quickly and painfully obvious to him in our first few months together.
I was so worthless in my own sight that when Dennis would say things like, "I love you," I got mad at him and told him to shut up! I didn't believe him because I truly didn't believe anybody could love me. I thought all he was trying to do was make me vulnerable.
I was resistant—resistant to him and resistant to God. I hadn't been raised with unconditional love, acceptance and confidence. The way I acted wasn't the way I wanted to be. It was just the only way I knew to be.
Words Of Faith
When Dennis discovered the enormous emotional baggage I was carrying, the only thing he knew to do was to tackle it by faith. Dennis could not approach me with the truth of what he wanted for me and what God had promised me without having me bark at him in resistance. So he began to speak to me while I was asleep.
There beside me, night after night, he would softly speak the truths of who God had really made me to be in Christ:
"You are somebody."
"You're a person of worth."
"You're somebody worth loving."
"God loves you."
"You have an opinion and it's valuable."
"You have something to say to people that they need to hear."
He didn't know he was applying a biblical principle. He just felt in his heart he should do this. The only safe time he could do it was while I was asleep.
Those words of faith, spoken in the night, changed my life. Over the next year I began to experience revolutionary change. I began to share my thoughts and opinions and began to let my personality come forth. In a very real sense, for the first time in my life I became a person.
It was many years later that Dennis told me what he had done. But following the prompting of the Holy Spirit, he was tapping into a principle we would later discover was echoed throughout the Bible.
This principle is for anyone who will purposely speak words that agree with God's Word. The Holy Spirit will empower those words to come to pass.
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