Keeping a Prayer Journal
After
being invited to speak at a local Christian fellowship I picked the topic
of "Keeping a Prayer Journal" and asked God, "If you
desire me to speak on this, then please give me some sign as a confirmation."
Shortly thereafter, while praying one of the members, unaware of my speaking
plans, received a message from God, which said:
My people, keep a record of the things my Son is doing in your life. They are precious accounts of my Spirit moving among you. And I want you to pass them down to your children and to your children’s children. It is important that these things that I am doing among you are recorded and kept and passed along...
I took that as a good indicator to proceed! So, here I go again. First, what is a prayer journal?; second, why journals are effective; third, a practical tip to keeping a journal.
I. What is a Prayer Journal?
A prayer journal is a recorded account of your relationship with God. In certain sense, the Bible is one huge prayer journal preserved by God’s people. Just like the Bible, your personal journal should contain:
- Things God says to you (messages from you and others)
- Things you say to God
- Stories of how he has answered requests
- Lyrics or songs to God
- Intellectual insights into his characters, and
- Trends of how He is working in your life.
In short, it should contain anything that will help you keep in mind God's
specific love for you and your specific love for Him..
Remembering God’s love for you is especially important during times of
testing. For example, during a tough time I searched through my journal for
charismatic messages God gave to me and I came upon a vision a friend received
of Jesus throwing confetti in the air, laughing and celebrating because I
love to worship Him! I laughed when my friend first described it and rereading
it years later I laughed again. It was very hard to remain discouraged! So
you could say I got many laughs for the price of one, only because I preserved
it. If I hadn't recorded it I might have forgotten about it forever.
Some spiritual directors refer to keeping a prayer as writing "a Fifth
Gospel." This book is not available in any store! It's your own unique,
special, personal account of your relationship with Jesus—you're the
only one who can write it.
II. Why Prayer Journals Are Effective
Recently an eight-year-old friend named Colin kept repeating a line from
a Joe Jackson song: "What’s the use of getting sober, if you’re
just gonna get drunk again?" How easily we are influenced by what
we focus on!
When I first began hearing the Lord speak clearly to me in prophecy I was
amazed at how often God used phrases such "keep in mind" and "focus
on Me." It was as if he was stressing that often the most important thing
was simply keeping in mind things we already know rather than seeking new
revelation.
Keeping in mind God's Words isn't just a nice thing to do; it's an essential
scriptural principle for maturing faith. The Bible says in that "faith
comes by hearing the Word of God." (Rom 10) Some people say "I
wish I had more faith." But the Bible says that if you want an increase
in faith, you don’t have to passively wait around for it to arrive. You
can get it by deliberately and repeatedly exposing yourself to God’s
Words, by bringing back into mind the Words God has already spoken. So, a
prayer journal helps us keep in mind God’s Word, both His unchangeable,
perfect Word in the Bible and His specific, personal Word to us.
This analogy helps me. The human memory is similar to computer memory, in
that they both have short-term and long-term memory. In a computer the short-term
memory is called RAM, and long-term memory is usually disk storage, such as
a hard disk. For both the human and the computer, short-term memory is quicker
and is used for priority tasks, and long-term memory is used for storage of
things that shouldn’t be forgotten, but aren’t priority. The disadvantage
for the human is that long-term memory degrades rapidly over time, and is
somewhat undependable. (Imagine if you tried to access a computer file from
a few months ago and the system responded "Sorry, I forgot what was in
it.") So we need some form of permanent long-term storage to augment
our minds, such as a prayer journal. Frankly, I’m amazed at how easy
it is for me to forget all the good things God has done and said to me over
the years, even when I want to remember them. In fact, one of the staggering
statistics about the human memory is that . . .
well, uh, I forgot what it was.
Fortunately, God doesn’t forget that man can’t remember! He encourages
us to right things down. God told the Israelites:
Hear this O Israel and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey…Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. When the LORD your God brings you into the land… when you eat and are satisfied be careful that you do not forget the LORD who brought you out of Egypt out of the land of slavery.
God says "Work at keeping my words on the forefront of your mind, so
that it may go well with you." That’s the main reason why a prayer
journal is helpful. It helps us bring past treasures of God’s Word from
long-term memory to short-term memory. If we leave it up to your natural tendencies,
we won’t remember. In fact, the word "truth" literally means "un-forgetting"!
Here's another illustration. I once asked my five-year old nephew:
"Michael, please don’t twist the knob on the stereo that
hard."
"Why?"
"Because I said so."
"Why?"
"Because you’ll break it!"
"Why?"
"Because the coefficient of force around the y-axis minus the x-axis
is not greater than sum of the forces in the z-direction, including gravity,
but not considering wind resistance or friction." (At that point, what
else could I have said? But his response again was:)
"Why? . . ."
After this exchange it occurred to me that as a child of God, I repeatedly ask God questions He has already given me good working answers to. The journal embarrasses me into seeing how often I've asked God something, later rediscovering His response in my journal. Certainly one reason when God can seem to be silent is not because He hasn’t addressed the issue, but it’s that I have an innate, habit to question Him regardless of whether or not He's already answered! A prayer journal helps me against my natural tendency to unthinkingly question God.
III. One Practical Tip to Keeping a Prayer Journal
Normally, an individual wouldn’t attend college without taking notes
(although I tried to), yet when it comes to trying to learn about the God
of the universe we can't expect heroic results with only mediocre study habits!
Sometimes we try to read God's actions in our lives with the same level of
effort that we read the TV guide.
Since it takes a certain amount of work to do a journal (actually very little),
my suggestion for one good approach is to simply force yourself to write down
one sentence every few days of your best guess at what God is saying to
you. If you end up writing down more than one sentence, that’s great!
But if you commit to one sentence a week then at least you’ve moved yourself
to the point where if you’re inspired to write down more, then you’re
available to. The one-sentence-a-week commitment is good because it removes
the burden of feeling that in every prayer time you have to write a novel.
The one-sentence weekly entry only has to trigger something that reminds you
of God’s love. (The journal is a tool to get to know Jesus, not an exercise
in data entry.) Even the apostle John says in the last line of his Gospel
that
Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written!
A Final Note
Suppose you’re looking at an image like the one below. A magnified portion of the image reveals that it is composed of many individual elements.
What is fascinating is that you would expect there to be just
a few tones, but there’s actually hundreds of shades which give the picture
its texture, shape and color. In addition to shades of yellow there are greens,
browns, reds, greys and whites, all contributing to the picture's quality.
Each day in prayer is like a dot in the picture. If we only have a few, then
it’s harder to see the whole picture. A prayer journal helps us see the
larger elements. It helps us step back and see the whole picture. I believe
people who persevere in prayer eventually see the face of Jesus emerging in
their lives.