We teach our teenagers to pray for revival in the youth group and their schools-for God’s Kingdom to advance, one Gospel conversation at a time, until it saturates our campuses and communities and world. No, the first request is for His Kingdom to come and His will to be done. Give us today our daily bread.” The first request we bring to God is not our Santa Claus wish list or even our own personal needs (although these are important to God!). Request “ Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. There’s a lot of truth to unpack in this singular sentence that will help teenagers know how to pray to and praise God. Praise “ Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name.” These eight words focus on who God is ( Our Father), how sovereign He is ( in Heaven), and how holy He is ( hallowed be your name). We use the acrostic P.R.A.Y., which stands for Praise, Request, Admit, Yield: At Lead THE Cause, we teach teenagers to pray by using the Lord’s prayer ( Matthew 6:9-13) as a guideline. Purchase or develop a good lesson or series on prayer that will show them how to pray with power. Sometimes teenagers don’t pray because they don’t know how. And teach them how to pray through the frustration until they reach faith, just as David did again and again throughout the Psalms. Point them to the Psalms, and show them how to cry out their prayers of “ How long, O Lord?” or “ Why?” to the Father. Get them to journal their prayers to God. If a teenager is in a desperate time (a breakup, their parents’ divorce, they’ve been bullied or betrayed, etc.), use that time to teach them to pray. There’s nothing like desperation to amp up our prayers of intercession, protection, and supplication. Let them hear you pray so that they proclaim, as Jesus’s disciples did: “ Teach us to pray!” 2. Let them overhear and participate in your intercession. Spend time pouring your heart out to God in prayer with teenagers. Make prayer part of the way you live and breathe. Here are five ideas for how to teach teens to pray: 1. It’s a largely untapped pipeline for both earthly and spiritual provisions, coming to us straight from Heaven’s limitless reservoirs! Instead, it’s a secret weapon to be aimed at the enemy of our souls. Instead, I followed the model of many of my leaders, who used prayer more like holy water to sanctify their whiteboard plans. Oh, how I wish I would have learned the art and science of prayer as a teenager. Now that I’m learning the power of prayer, I can scream “ Say hello to my little friend,” as I blast away at Satan’s strongholds in my life, church, community, and nation! I can worship God and praise Him for who He is and what He has done! I can intercede at Jesus’s side for both believers and unbelievers alike! Once I did, it felt like for the majority of my life I’d been throwing dirt clods at Satan, only to discover there was a bazooka in the closet. Sadly, it took me about four decades to begin to truly discover the power of prayer. If I could get in a time machine and go back to teenaged Greg, I’d tell him one thing: Learn how to pray.
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