By 
A very simple practice has revolutionized my prayer life. This one change in my daily lifestyle — which I will explain below — has been so growth-producing for me, and it has so impacted my daily life of prayer, that I now have come to realize that it is the #1 thing which has most developed my prayer life as a disciple of Jesus!
What was this life-shaping new practice? Simply this: I made the commitment that I would write out a prayer that I would pray to the Lord every single day. The same prayer … every day … month in and month out.
This prayer is how I am able to prepare myself for the new day as a follower of Jesus by setting my heart upon the following crucial areas of my life and the needs that I have:
– it is how I ‘preach the gospel to myself’ at the start of every day
– it is how I make sure I am aware of my need for God’s mercy and grace for the day
– it is how I bring my failures and sins and short-comings before the Lord with a repentant heart
– it is how I very intentionally ask to be filled with the Spirit for my new day
– it is how I focus my spiritual eyes onto the glory of the Triune God — Father, Son, and Spirit
– and it is how I gear my mind into being on the look-out for those to whom the Lord is going to want me to share the gospel of Christ and to whom He wants me to show His love in the new day.
I truly cannot recommend too highly this simple practice for your prayer life as a significant option for you to consider stepping into.
If you choose to do so, your ‘Daily Prayer’ will, I’m sure, look very different than mine (which can be read below). The important thing is that you prayerfully craft out a written prayer (always having the freedom to adapt, edit, expand, delete, and change sections in it later on) that expresses to the Lord realities for your own walk with Him that you know … you know … you know— you are going to need to submit to Him and ask for every single day. I encourage you to craft it with the goal of making it a truly well-thought-out prayer that has depth. You can define what ‘depth’ means — for yourself. But put some real thought and Scripture-soaking into your process of putting your daily prayer down into written form.
Below is the prayer that I have written out and refined over time, which is the one I pray every morning. It guides me into praying about the needs which I realize that in my life journey are ones that I need to bring before Him every single day. As you will see, in the #2 version below (the fully formatted version) I have added some graphics that I have created as a means of reviewing visually the incredible realities of what God the Father, Son, and Spirit did in order to bring into my life the full work of Christ which He lived out on my behalf. In the fully formatted version below, I have also used bolding, italicizing, and underlining — as well as a variety of colored fonts — to impress the many phrases of this extended prayer into my thoughts as I see them and pray them.
May this prayer serve as a motivation to you to craft a prayer of your own that expresses your heart to the Lord each day. Click below to read the prayer:
To see the prayer in a black and white version with no formatting — click here:
To see the prayer the way I actually use it each day — in the full color version with distinctive formatting and graphics that I reflect on each morning as I start my day — click here: