Why do I pray? It is not to make myself feel better as a Christian, nor to make me look like a better Christian than anybody else. I do it because it is the way that I am able to talk to God and a time for me to express what my heart is feeling. I believe that God is a promise keeper and when I pray I know that those prayers will be answered when He plans to answer them. I feel like most people only feel the need to pray when something scary is happening to a loved one or a friend. I never really understood what prayer could be until last year because even I would pray to God when something stressful was going on like in school, in my family's life or one of my friend's needed me to pray for them with similar situations. Here is what I have learned about my God, it is that He loves us so much that He wants a personal relationship with us. Sure, He already knows what is going to happen in our life, but He wants us to come to Him to talk and share about what is going on in our lives.
Common things that we all pray about are usually about our self. For example, praying to be more patient, to be nicer to people, to have open eyes and not judge others, to be thankful for the blessing in our life and so on. These are all great things to be praying about, but have you ever considered praying for the unreached people in this world? Unreached people are the people that have never heard of the good news that Jesus and God brings. These people are everywhere, and they might even be someone you know. Being a believer and hearing that there are millions of people in this world that do not know about the good news breaks my heart, but it breaks God's even more.
When I was preparing to go on my first mission trip to New York over spring break, our team was constantly praying for the unreached people in New York. I prayed that God would pursue their hearts and that he would place the unreached people that He wanted our team to talk to in our lives. I firmly believe that God answered those prayers because when we got to New York the people that I was able to meet as well as the people on our team got to meet felt that they were longing for something like this in their life! How incredible is that? Now that I have been and saw a broken city with broken people that did not know about the good news of Jesus Christ because they grew up not being able to have ever heard about it, I think about them all the time and I pray for them. I pray that the Lord would pursue their hearts and that God would keep pursuing those that are believers in that area to act out in faith and share the good news.
Ephesians 6:18 says this "And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord's people." With this, I encourage you to reflect on what it is that you usually pray for or who your prayers are about and take a moment to pray for all the Lord's people because there are many who do not know who He is.
