It’s Okay If You Haven’t Been Stellar At Praying
I’ll be honest. I have not always been consistent in my prayer life, particularly when my children were tiny. There were times when I would forget to pray for them for days at a time.
Often, I wasn’t sure exactly WHAT to pray for them either. So many of my natural inclinations of what to pray – to keep them safe, to prevent failure, to keep them from getting hurt – aren’t really in my kids’ best interests. While I hate to see my children fail or get hurt or be in danger, I also know that those things help them to forge character and grow and learn.
But, let’s be real here, who wants to pray that for their kids?
Prayer Isn’t a Warranty Against the Tough Stuff
Prayer is also not a guarantee against bad stuff happening or a child straying from their faith, either. We can pray faithfully from the day our child is born until we take our last breath, but that doesn’t mean our child won’t make wrong choices or endure difficult or unfair things in his or her life.
About the time my kids were starting school, I came across a book by Beth Moore about praying the Scriptures. I decided to pick out some key Scriptures to pray over my boys on a regular basis.
Pick Out a Few Key Verses To Pray Over Your Children
I knew I wanted my kids to love Jesus, and that their relationship with Him was foundational for everything else in their life. So, one of the first verses I started praying for my kids was found in Luke 10:27.
The second verse I picked out to pray over my kids was about God’s love for us. For me, truly believing that God loved me was life transforming. When you grow up in church, it’s so easy to take God’s love for granted and not really think about what it truly means that God loves us.
It’s also easy when you grow up in church to start equating God’s love with our performance. I don’t know that anyone ever comes out and says that. However, when you hear Bible lessons about obedience and all the things you aren’t supposed to do, that message can inadvertently come across. So, the next verses I prayed for my kids came from Ephesians.
Finally, I really wanted my kids to understand what it meant to be in Christ. I wanted them to grow in their own relationship with God. Instead of relying on my faith and their dad’s faith, I wanted them to stand independently and firmly on the foundation of who they were in Christ.
Coming from a Christian home and being raised in church can be a huge blessing. But it can also sometimes make the sheer grace of the gospel seem a bit muffled.
The other verse I prayed regularly for my boys also is found in Ephesians. Paul is praying for the Ephesian Christians to fully understand just who they are in Christ. I decided to steal a page from Paul’s book.
Of course, over the years, these are not the only verses I’ve prayed over my kids, but they have been the constant ones. They were the verses that formed the backbone of contending for my children in the spiritual realm.
Because, let’s be honest, we are in a daily fight for our kids aren’t we? The enemy, the world and their own flesh natures continually want to get them off track.
Do you have some favorite verses you pray over your kids? If so, I’d love to hear about them!
