Thursday 12 February 2015

What is Prayer?

We have been discovering what prayer is.

 

If you do pray, have you ever thought what its like, and have you ever thought what prayer actually is?

Well if you haven't thought about that, you're in luck! Because we have!

 

What do we think about prayer?

  • we use the things God created (our ears and mouth)
  • asking (politely) for things
  • talking to God
  • communicating with God
  • saying sorry 
  • saying thank you 

What does the bible say about prayer?

  • John 15:7 - Abide in me
  • Mark 11:24 - Praying in Faith
  • Luke 11:9 - Ask, Seek, Knock
  • 1 Timothy 2:1-5 - Intercession
  • Matthew 6:5-14 - The Lord's Prayer
 
(by Bluebell)
  
By Red:
 
For this activity I wanted to focus on bible study. We pray often with our kids but it's good to remind them and ourselves why we pray. So this was a session spent largely in our bibles, but to maintain their interest we used ipads too! So we started by looking at the question:
What do you think prayer is?
we wrote down on pieces of paper what we thought prayer was. Then we looked at:
What does the bible say about prayer?

Using ipads and bibles we searched for scriptures on prayer. (We happen to have ipads but you can do this on anything that can access google or (I recommend) biblegateway.com)

I allowed 5-10 miniutes for this and then we share some of the scriptures they highlighted (some of them Blue has posted above)


We then looked at:
What can we pray about?
and again wrote down our answers.

Finally the kids chose one scripture that had particularly spoken to them and made a sign to stick up in their rooms. We did this with paper and pens but if your kids are particularly adept on an ipad etc you can do this digitally!
It's great to have scripture around our house to remind us of God's promises to us. Plus for them particularly it is a reminder of something they have discovered for themselves, it means so much more to them then.


What I loved about this time was that it really helped my kids to see the bible as real, as something that they can use every day. Especially in this digital age when you can access the whole of the bible at the click of a button, what a great tool to have at our finger tips. Plus using google it was a bit like a treasure hunt and they loved that, with comments like 'oh I've got one', 'found another one', 'this ones good!' etc Also it engaged them on their level but enabled me to share some deeper things with them about prayer and faith.

So often when we spend time together  in prayer or looking at the bible, conversations just open up really naturally, it's giving them the time to think about stuff that often we don't, even as adults, which is really valuable. This time one of them drew a picture of 'God's Kingdom' and explained exactly what it was and the light of God, the glory shining out of it.  This was a real encourgament for her when I explained what the bible says about the Kingdom of God and how we can shine God's glory to those around us.







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