There are different forms of Christian prayer,
but whether you have a set prayer time or seek
to communicate with God throughout the day
(or some combination of both), here are 10
Christian prayers that are extremely dangerous
to pray. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pray
them … we should! It just means that when we
pray them, we should watch out!
1. Teach me humility.
After you pray this Christian prayer for
humility, be ready for people to badmouth you,
slander you, and drag your name through the
mud. If you pray for humility, be ready for false
accusations, for that “skeleton in the closet” to
be revealed, or for people to belittle you and
talk down to you as if you were inferior.
The only way to learn humility is to be placed
in humbling situations, so if you pray for
humility, be ready!
2. Teach me patience.
If you pray for patience, get ready to be
surrounded by the most annoying people you
have ever met. Get ready for your car to break
down when you are late for an appointment.
Get ready for your children to go bonkers. Get
ready for prayers to not get answered. Get
ready for setbacks, roadblocks, and pitfalls.
Just like with all the other Christian prayers on
this list, God teaches us patience by taking us
through trying times.
3. Lead me wherever you want me to go.
One way this Christian prayer is often prayed
is with the words, “Here I am, Lord, send me.”
Usually when we pray this Christian prayer, we
think that God is going to send us into high
profile ministry positions, places of honor and
glory, and opportunities to be heard. This is
why ministry leaders almost never “feel the
leading of God” to go to smaller ministries and
places of lesser significance. God always
seems to “call” pastors and ministry
professionals to bigger churches, richer
ministries, and positions with greater power.
While I do not deny that God sometimes leads
people in these directions, I think that more
often than not, God wants to lead us
downward, but we refuse to go. Of course, this
does not mean that we will stay in the gutter if
God leads us there. God may very well lift us
up out of the gutter to a place of prominence,
but when He does so, He gets the glory
instead of us.
That’s why this is such a dangerous Christian
prayer. We want to be used by God for great
things in His kingdom, but God’s path to
greatness usually does not mirror what we had
in mind. God’s path to greatness usually leads
to prison, death, and the gates of hell.
Also (and this fits with #1 above), when we
pray this prayer, we will often be faced with a
choice between two ministry positions, one
that leads to honor, glory, and fame, and one
that leads to obscurity and insignificance.
Though the temptation is to choose glory and
honor, such decisions may actually be a choice
to follow Jesus downward into humility.
I once heard Francis Schaeffer say in an
interview that if given the choice between two
ministry positions, we should choose the one
with less fame and glory.
4. Help me understand the
plight of the poor.
This Christian prayer is like asking God to make
you poor. Yikes! How can you understand the
plight of the poor unless you become poor
yourself?!
So do you like your nice house, your two cars,
your steak dinners, and your Caribbean
vacations? Don’t ask God to help you
understand the plight of the poor.
5. Make me more like
Jesus.
In one way or another, this has been a constant
life prayer of mine. A couple years back, I
realized that this prayer ruined my life.
I had my life all figure out, and it was all going
according to my perfect plan. Then I started
praying this prayer. Before long, all my hopes
and dreams lay shattered around my feet. I often
tried to pick up the pieces and glue everything
back together, but God would come through with
His baseball bat and smash it all to hell (almost
literally… all of my plans and dreams deserved
nothing more).
When you pray to be like Jesus, God will begin to
break down, burn away, and slough off anything
and everything in your life that does not look like
Jesus. This sounds nice until you begin to
experience it. The purification of our life may be
with God’s refining fire, but it sill burns!.
6. Give me more faith.
Christians like our beliefs in nice, neat packages.
But life is not like that, and neither is life with
God.
When Christians pray for God to give us more
faith, we are likely to enter into some of the
difficult and doubt-filled times of our lives. You
will begin to question everything you have never
known and everything you have ever believed.
You may even begin to doubt God’s goodness
and maybe even His existence.
This is not bad. Embrace the doubts. Understand
that if what you believe it true, it can stand up
against all questions. Truth does not fear a
challenge. There is no other way for your faith to
grow than for your faith to be tested.
7. Give me victory over sin
and temptation.
How do you think victory comes, except through
ever-increasing cycles of temptation? Sure, God
does not send the temptations, and He never
allows us to be tempted with more than we can
bear, but if we pray for God to give us victory
over sin and temptation, this is the same thing
as asking God to strengthen us so that we can
stand up under greater and greater temptations!
So if you pray this Christian prayer, be ready for
an onslaught of all the wiles of the devil.
8. Please help my
annoying neighbor/
coworker come to Christ.
This is a great Christian prayer. Except guess
how God is going to help your annoying neighbor
or coworker come to Christ? That’s right. He’s
going to use you.
I once heard a story of a Bible study group who
decided to make a prayer list of all the people
they “disliked” the most, and then pray for these
people every week as part of the Bible study.
Over the course of the next ten years, all but one
of the people on that list became believers, and
almost all of them became Christians because
the members of that Bible study showed grace,
love, mercy, and forgiveness to these “annoying”
people.
If you are going to pray for someone, be
prepared to answer your own prayers.
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