Along with our emphasis on fresh starts with the Fresh Year Fresh Start series, Brooke is challenging us to seriously consider stepping up our prayer life for our kids this year.  This is a challenge that I definitely need to sign on for in 2010!  I shared what has helped me pray for my kids last January, so I thought I would “rework” this for you today and challenge myself to start fresh!

Prayer, along with daily Bible study, is an area that I definitely has a pattern of ebb and flow in my daily walk. Sometimes I’m disciplined about this time with God, and have a vitality and closeness of communion with Him that is wonderful. When I actually take the time to bring all the troubles and concerns, big and small, that are on my heart and lay them before the throne- lo and behold, He answers! It’s exciting and comforting and I revel in my time with the King.

Other times, not so much. I get busy. I’m distracted. I find myself justifying the lack of time with the Lord with other “important” things. I’m not listening to Him, I’m not casting my cares on Him… and I lose that sense of intimacy. I’m not walking daily with the Spirit.

One of the things I find to be a very useful tool in seeking to have a regular, meaningful time with the Lord is a prayer list with different things for each day of the week or month. If I sit down with a list (written or mental) that simply lists people or concerns, after a couple of days I find myself becoming very dry and repetitive, which means I disengage my heart and mind and repeat familiar words.

I have a list of character qualities and spiritual aspects that I use when I pray for my children. It has been awesome to use this and pray for these 31 aspects of spiritual growth and development. The kicker is, I often find that the quality I am praying for that day has been something I’ve been struggling to model or live out myself! I talked about this way back with my post about the Elmo underwear - apparently that post struck some nerves because people still occasionally refer to that when I talk to them!! :)

So, here it is. I found this online somewhere and modified it… Sadly, I don’t know where it originally came from!! You can download your own copy of this list here.

Prayer for Children

Show me your ways, O Lord,
teach me your paths;
guide me in Your truth and teach me,
for you are God my Savior,
and and my hope is in You all day long.
Psalm 25:4-5

For another great idea of how to incorporate praying for your children into your daily routine, check out Courtney’s prayer card post here.  And click over to Brooke’s challenge to read more about it or link up your own!

Picture from freefoto.com

Lord, I give you this day. It is a gift from your hand, and I am grateful for it and whatever it may hold for me. I give today back to you, for I want it all to be for your glory.

I give you the moments, minutes, hours that are before me – enable me to use them well, redeem the time, and not squander what you have entrusted to me.

I give you my thoughts, my attitudes, the intents of my heart – purify and redeem them. I long for them to be pleasing to You.

I give you my words and the tone of my voice – they have the power to give life or death. May they be full of Your Truth and Your love.

I give you my home and the things You have entrusted to my care – help me to rule and bring order to this physical domain for Your glory, not mine.

I give you my marriage – may I be a woman after your heart. May I be a virtuous wife who brings my husband good. Teach me anew to love, to honor, to submit out of reverence for You.

Lord, I give you my precious children. Cause me to be gentle and tender, to guard my mouth and reactions, to teach them the Truth and train them to do what is right.

I give you the interactions with others that will come today – phone calls, store clerks, emails, social media… may my words, tone, presence speak loudly of your love and grace.

Show me Your ways. Teach me Your paths. Guide me in Your Truth and teach me, for You are God my Savior – my hope is in You all day long.

On Tuesday I posted God’s Big Story, which is something that has been rolling around in my head for years and finally has been making its way onto paper the last couple of weeks. I was thinking about writing this explanation post and then an old friend from college just called to say that she was thinking about giving The Big Story to a friend of hers, and we were talking about why I wrote it, etc. I think it would probably be appropriate for me to fill you in, also! :)

I have pondered for years the way we as believers typically share the Gospel with someone. If you were trained to share your faith in the past, you probably were encouraged to write out your testimony and then share the problem of sin and the solution of salvation through Christ. Sometimes we hand out tracts that summarize the Gospel into a few short bullet points.

The problem is, as time goes on our society is becoming more and more biblically illiterate. Add to that the postmodern bent to people’s thinking (who are you to say that I “sin”? Who defines what “sin” is and who “God” is? My truth is different than yours! I agree that Jesus was a good man but I think you’re being judgmental to say that He is the “only way”), and we are increasingly speaking different languages.

This was cemented in my mind and heart a few weeks ago when I was speaking with a friend who leads classes at our local Pregnancy Support Center. She had a particularly interested and spiritually curious group who had asked a lot of questions. She mentioned something about Adam and Eve at one point in their discussion, and then realized that many of them had never heard of Adam and Eve! How do you explain the Gospel to people with absolutely no Biblical foundation?

To answer this question, it is helpful to go to the book of Acts. The early church was sharing the Gospel both with Jews who had all the background and needed to connect the dots and see that Jesus was the promised Messiah they had been waiting for, and with Gentiles who had no understanding of the True God whatsoever.

Acts 17 is a fascinating study of evangelism. When Paul arrives in Thessalonica, he goes to the synagogue – “on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead. ‘This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Christ,’ he said.” (17:2-3) His audience understood his language – the Jews had been expecting The Christ, the promised Seed. What they needed to understand was that Jesus was the Christ! So, he started right at what they needed to understand.

Later in Acts 17, Paul is in Athens and engages the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in conversation. “Some of them asked, ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ Others remarked, ‘He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’ They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.’” (17:18-20)

They didn’t get it. It was “strange” to their ears, it sounded like babbling – it was as though they were speaking another language. So, when Paul spoke in the Areopagus, guess where he started? Not with Jesus, but with creation – “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth…” (17:24) He built a basis for understanding so that they could see who Jesus was and why it mattered.

We are surrounded by many people who not only don’t believe in Jesus, they might not even have heard of Adam and Eve, the fall, depravity, and the One True God who desires to have a relationship with them. When we walk by them with our Christian slogans on our t-shirts, or hand them a “four spiritual laws” tract, or tell them at Christmas, “Jesus is the reason for the season”… it sounds like you’re speaking a foreign language. Tell them they are sinners, that Jesus is the only True Way, and they are confused or angry – it doesn’t make any sense in their mental framework!

I have found that it is very hard to find resources that explain the whole story of Scripture – either for “unreached Americans” who haven’t been taught anything about Scripture, or for new believers who find it confusing to crack open the Bible for the first time and don’t know where to start or what in the world it means.

This is why I wrote out God’s Big Story – to give people some mental “pegs” to hang Truths on in further conversation. After explaining the whole story, creation, the fall, sin, Israel and the law, Jesus … it all makes so much more sense! It is my prayer that it will open doors for further discussion, further questions, further openness to the Truth.

Please feel free to download the PDF of The Big Story. Feel free to use it on your blog or church website. Grab the Big Story button on the right hand side – it will link readers back to the God’s Big Story post here on Run the Earth, Watch the Sky. Read it and use it in discussion with your unsaved friends.

Whatever you do, I pray that this will give you some ideas on ways to share and explain His Truth. We’re not in the synagogue anymore, folks – we’re in Athens. We’re surrounded by people who think we are babbling in a different language. Let’s stop babbling to ourselves and start helping it to make sense to the unreached around us every day.

I saw a great idea on another blog a few weeks back for a Scripture memory system – the original idea can be found at Simply Charlotte Mason.

I don’t know about you, but I often have good intentions that fall on their face for lack of a “master plan,” if you will. Scripture memory is one of these areas, both for myself and for teaching the kids! I know how important it is to memorize and meditate on Scripture, but somehow getting from the knowing to the doing is difficult!! So, when I saw this idea I had to try it – it is simple and intentional and will help us hide God’s Word deeply in our hearts!

The strength of this system, in my opinion, will be the regular review. You write your memory verses on index cards and file them behind different dividers – daily, evens, odds, one for each day of the week, and one for each day of the month. Then each day, you will work on your verse you are currently learning, which will be behind the “daily” divider. Then after you work on that, you will review the cards behind the applicable dividers. For instance, today is Tuesday the 9th, so you would review the “odd” verse, the “Tuesday” verse, and the “9″ verse. As you master the new verses, you bump everything back a divider. Simple and ingenious!

So, today I set out to find a recipe card box that was pretty… no luck. But, I did find a very cute little basket at Flower Factory for $2.00 – sold! I picked up some 4×6 cards for $.44, and three sheets of heavyweight scrapbook paper.

I made my own dividers out of the scrapbook paper because I didn’t feel like shelling out the cash to buy premade index card dividers… and at this point I don’t have dividers for the days of the month – I think I’m just going to number the upper right corner of the cards.

I’m excited about this tackle, and look forward to utilizing this system to memorize God’s Word together! I believe we will start making a habit of reviewing our verses at the breakfast table each morning.

You might be interested in the list of verses Leigh at Impress Your Kids has compiled – each verse corresponds to a letter of the alphabet to make it memorable. :)