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how to pray for your children, there have been various ways
that I have prayed for my children over the years. While I pray
for my children often throughout the day, I find that it is good to
have a system or else my children, who aren’t having an obvious
struggle in their life at the moment, tend to get neglected in
my prayer life. What I have done the past few years is to “assign”
a day of the week to each child. I happen to have five children
and there are five work days of the week, so I pray for a specific
child on a specific day. (I pray for my husband on Saturdays and
myself on Sundays.) I have a married son so I pray for him and his
wife and baby (who will be born by the time this article goes to
print) on the same day. (We are more than a little excited about
meeting this precious little miracle baby in person!) This system
does not mean that I don’t pray for my other children or my hus-
band on a day is not “assigned” to them, but I especially focus
my prayer time for each family member on their specific day.
Another way we can pray for our children is to pray Scripture.
For example, if I read Philippians 4:8 in my Bible reading time,
I can stop and pray, “Dear Heavenly Father, Please help (insert
child’s name) to think on whatever is true, whatever is honor-
able, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely and
whatever is commendable.”What a blessing that we can use the
words of our Lord and Savior to pray for our children. (I do the
same for my husband and others.) One caution, though. Some-
times when we pray Scripture for our children, it is easy to fall
into a rote method of “vain repetition.”When we pray Scripture
for our children, we need to mean it sincerely from the heart. We
need to focus on the words, just as we do with the prayers we
pray in our own words.
As alluded to a couple of paragraphs ago, we must be as dili-
gent to pray for our compliant children as we are for our more
stubborn children. Most of us with several children have one or
two who are compliant, desire to please Mom and Dad, and who
have a heart to serve. We also have one or two children who
seem to fight us on nearly everything, doubt our motives, and
are just downright stubborn. And then there are the children
who are somewhere in between. It is easy to focus our prayers
on the children who cause us to struggle most in our parenting.
However, our compliant children need our prayers just as much
as our stubborn ones. Perhaps more so, because the sins of our
stubborn children are very obvious. The sins of our compliant
children are more hidden. Just as we want our stubborn children
to become Christ-like, we want our compliant children to stay
Christ-like. We also want God to work on their hearts and help
them overcome any hidden sins that we do not know about.
Colossians 4:2 tells us, “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being
watchful in it with thanksgiving.”That is how we should pray for
our children, both watchfully and with thanksgiving. It is amaz-
ing to me that God has given us the privilege to come to Him in
prayer. I am in awe that the Creator of the universe cares about
me enough to listen to my prayers. How terrible it would be to
waste this great honor and to not pray for our children. May
God bless each of you as you bring your children before Him in
prayer!
Kim Stilwell moved to Iowa when she married her high school
sweetheart and best friend in 1987. Jeff and Kim have five children
and a daughter-in-love. The days were indeed long, yet the years
far too short, and their children are now all older teens and young
adults.
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