Four Prayers That Will Change Your Life and Our World
What if you could become a different person in 5 minutes a day over just 30 days... by praying?
If you've ever tried to pray, that might sound ridiculous.
But ask any prophet, apostle, or saint down through the ages, and you'll hear the same testimony: at the heart of any real transformation sits... prayer. And, more recently, science seems to be echoing these same ancient truths.
So what are we missing?
In this series, we'll explore what saints & scientists seem to agree on: we need to learn a different way to pray. A better way. A different posture altogether — what some have called a prayer of the heart.
These are four prayers that can change your brain, heal your relationships, quiet your restlessness, and awaken your soul.
So we're going to try them. Five minutes a day. Thirty days. Together.
Week 1: The Answer (I’m Told) Is Prayer
Saints and scientists seem to agree: Prayer is the answer.
Which, if you've ever tried to pray, kind of sounds ridiculous.
But it's true. You should pray. In this series, we'll look at four prayer practices that will change your life and our world. But before we can go there, we have to make sure we're talking about the same thing. What kind of prayer actually changes us and our world?
Three words: Hear. Awe. Behold.
We'll sit with the prayer Jesus prayed every morning and every evening, ask what could possibly make a distracted/divided person fully present, and look at how the earliest Christians drew themselves when they prayed.
Week 2: When a Million Things Pull You Apart, Pray Like This
You can do everything right and still come apart. That's Martha in Luke 10 — busy, resentful, and missing that God is standing in her living room.
Most of us aren't falling apart because we're doing something wrong. We're falling apart because we're doing too many things right — and somewhere in all of it we've lost track of why we started.
Luke has a word for that. So does a sixth-century pope who ran a collapsing city and still found time to pray. So, it turns out, does the research. This message is about what it takes to stay whole when everything in your life is pulling in a different direction — and why a five minute prayer practice might just be the difference.
Then we're going to try it. Five minutes a day for thirty days, starting together at the end of the message.
Week 3: How to Pray for Someone You Can't Stand
The first time I prayed for my enemy, I said the words, but I felt hollow.
In Matthew 5, Jesus dropped the line early Christians quoted more than any other — love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. It's the sentence that made them recognizable in a world that had never seen anything like it. It's also the one we skip. So, we go back to what Jesus was actually quoting and what he means by a word we translate 'perfect' — which turns out to be different than what we originally thought.
Then, we stop talking and try it. 5 minutes. 4 names. 4 words. You may find out your love has edges. That's not failure. That's a road that's torn up, and it's the one He's putting back together.
Week 4: The Two-Word Prayer That Just Might Save You | Luke 17
The first time I got a $20 tip, I felt amazing. A year later, anything less felt like an insult. How did I become so ungrateful? Luke 17 tells us.
Ten men with leprosy cry out to Jesus. And all ten are healed. But only one comes back to say thank you. And Jesus wants to know: What happened to the other nine?
As we follow Jesus’s question and pull on this thread through the Scriptures, we discover that gratitude is not just a life hack. Not just the polite thing to do. It's what happens when you finally see reality clearly: you didn't make yourself, you're not keeping yourself alive right now, and every good thing you have is a gift you did nothing to earn. To say “thank you” is to agree with the way things actually are.
And Jesus suggests that just might have something to do with being saved.
Week 5: Lectio Divina: No One Ever Taught Me to Pray Like This
I spent years studying the Bible, and it almost killed my faith. Turns out you can master every word and still miss the whole point.
In Luke 10, an expert in the Scriptures tries to get Jesus to enter into his convoluted debates over the meaning of the text. Instead, Jesus invites him to enter into the Word of God. It's a whole different way of reading the Scriptures as prayer.
It's something Christians down through the ages have called Lectio Divina. It's ancient but has largely been forgotten in our times. Today we are going to (re)learn this ancient way of praying God's Word in the hope that we might encounter the living Jesus in His living Word.
