Becoming a Prayer WarriorSample

Praying about our souls

Ever since I studied the New Testament’s pattern of prayers, I read over our church’s prayer requests with a curious eye. For example, I recently printed out four weeks of our congregation’s prayer requests and tracked how many requests came in for physical blessings (surgery, safe travels, healing, etc.) and how many requests came in for spiritual blessings (a friend’s salvation, growth in faith, ministry faithfulness, etc.). The results? In those four weeks, our church family submitted 167 prayers for physical blessings and 40 for spiritual blessings.

In the New Testament, that is about the same breakdown that the crowds submitted when they came to Jesus. However, when Jesus himself prayed and the apostles prayed after the Day of Pentecost, the ratio flipped, with three out of every four prayers being about spiritual blessings (consider the Lord’s Prayer as one such example).

Please hear me clearly. It’s not bad to pray for physical things. Jesus himself taught us to pray for daily bread, and if my children are sick, I am going to ask for your powerful prayers. But may we not miss the fact that Satan’s greatest attacks won’t be aimed at our bodies but instead at our beliefs and our behaviors. Friends, let’s keep praying about our bodies, and let’s add a whole lot of conversations about our souls.

As Paul taught in his crash course on spiritual warfare, “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Ephesians 6:18).