Praying the Gospel

Praying the Gospel

by Andrew Tink

Think of your prayers before dinner or at bedtime with your children. How often are they focused on thankfulness for very tangible things (the food, nice weather, people being healthy)? Or focused on asking for very tangible things for the next day? If you are anything like me, this summarizes the majority of your prayers. And this isn’t all wrong. After all, Jesus specifically taught his disciple to pray, “give us our daily bread”. But how else should we be modeling and teaching prayer to our children?

What if our prayers with our children not only taught them how to pray, but regularly reminded them of the truths of the Gospel? The Gospel story has often been summarized in the 4 major movements of God, Man, Christ, Response. What if the way we structured our prayers with our kids reminded them of this Gospel story?

For example:

  1. God – spend time thanking God and acknowledge him for who he is – Creator, Sustainer, Holy, The One to whom we are accountable, etc.
  2. Man – acknowledge our sinful state and ask for forgiveness for specific sins
  3. Christ – thank God for Christ’s humility, the saving work of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and for being our provision.
  4. Response –simply declare out loud my faith in Jesus alone as my Savior and Lord.  Thanking him that salvation and eternity in heaven are real, something we long for and look forward to.  Ask for a genuine and deepening faith rooted in Christ.

Perhaps using this structure with our children could both reinforce the gospel message in their minds and also help them move beyond praying for only tangible and concrete objects? Perhaps we’ll see their prayers change from only praying about the physical world to praying about the spiritual world. Perhaps we will see our prayers change as well.