How God Revitalized my Prayer Life as a Pastor

Crucial lessons on having a heart living on the edge of faith.

I have a confession: My prayer life has not been great.

This is strange because I have the prayer tools:

• I have a prayer map

• I have a whiteboard to put all prayer requests

• I have verses attached to these prayers

BUT.. I found when I got to pray, it was just…hard. I would start but I couldn’t persist in the place of prayer.

I would learn soon that it was not a tooling issue, it was a heart issue.

Recently I took my yearly personal retreat. I was wrestling with the Lord with this. He started giving me insight into this.

It started with something a mentor said to me recently:

Phil, you’re really gifted. But your challenge is that you can just stay in your gifting vs operating out of the Holy Spirit’s power.

Man that was some insight!

And then the Holy Spirit started to speak to me about my deteriorating spiritual life.

I started thinking about 2024. I started thinking about how it was a season where the output of my ministry was not met by the quality of my inner life. And as a result, my prayer life suffered.

And when that spiritual life started waning, I started leaning on my own strength.

It kind of looked something like this:

What my inner-life looks like when my inner life cannot support my outer-life.

As I sat there in my retreat God started challenging my prayer life.

This was our conversation:

God: Phil look at your prayer list. What do you observe?

Me: I don’t know God, what do you see?

God: I see a prayer list where everything you put there you think you can do in your own strength. Your prayer list doesn’t need me. Your prayer map are just things you think you can do in your own excellence and gifting.

It was a rude wakeup call.

He was challenging me basically saying: Your prayer list sucks.

You’re not even hoping for the things that only GOD CAN DO.

If my prayer list doesn’t need a MIRACLE to pull off, then it is a prayer list not from heaven.

It’s not even the prayer list’s fault. It was a reflection of my own heart.

Did I crave the fruit that only GOD can do? Do I in my heart desire to see the MOVE OF GOD? Or is my life built on what I as a “gifted” person can do?

So God started rebuilding my prayer life, piece by piece.

I started rewriting my prayer list to be full of things that were out of reach.

And oh man, my heart is hungry again. I want to see revival. I want to see the lost reached. I want to see family members come to know Him. I want to see sick healed and dead people raised.

To pray is to ask God for the miracles of God. And he has captured my heart again for the things that only God can do.

How does your prayer life look these days?
Is it of things that only God can do or of things that we has humans can do in our own strength?

You were made for goodness,
Phil