Comfort Cafe » Praying for Your Prodigal. By Ray Pritchard. Not long ago I received an email with a heartrending question: I have a daughter that I don’t believe is saved. I pray for her but often times I can’t. I suppose that I’m angry she isn’t responding and feel incapable of helping her.
What can I pray for on a daily basis so that she will come to Christ? At times I feel such sorrow, thinking she might go to hell. Universal Heart’s Cry. This parent speaks for mothers and fathers everywhere who pray for their prodigal children, often for years, with seemingly no results. I do not doubt that praying parents must at some point feel like giving up, and it must be hard not to get angry when you see your children repeatedly making bad choices or showing no interest in the gospel. How do you keep believing for your own prodigal son or daughter? When I use the word “prodigal,” I’m referring to anyone who has drifted away or run away or totally rejected their Christian heritage.
It could refer to a college student who simply stops going to church or to a man who thinks he doesn’t need “religion” or to someone who becomes an atheist. Defining a Prodigal.
A prodigal could be someone who gets so busy in their career that they have no time for God. In all those cases, the prodigal was raised in a Christian home or had a Christian background and for some reason no longer lives for the Lord. In thinking about cases like this, we often wonder if the prodigal is saved or lost. The answer is, only God knows because only he can read the heart.
We see the outside and to us, it may be easy to conclude that the person we thought we knew so well was never saved in the first place. But our knowledge is limited. While the prodigal may appear to have totally rejected his background and he may give all the appearances of being lost, only God knows for certain. At The Beginning. In thinking about hard questions, it’s crucial that we start in the right place. Nowhere is this more important than when we pray for our prodigal sons and daughters.
Because we have so much invested in them, we may be tempted to give up because the pain of praying when nothing seems to be happening finally becomes overwhelming. He was raised in the church, he went to Sunday School, he knows the Bible, but when he left home, he left it all behind. For many years she has prayed for him but to this day he remains a prodigal son. A wife prays for her husband who left her after twenty- three years of marriage for a younger woman. He seems utterly unreachable and the marriage heads swiftly for divorce. A husband prays for his wife who has terminal cancer.
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She has six, maybe seven months to live. None of the treatments stop the rampaging tumors. The elders anoint her with oil and pray over her in the name of the Lord. She dies five months later.
The poem Tears of the Prodigal Son draws on the well-known biblical Parable of the Prodigal Son found in Luke 15:11-32, the basis of which forms a story on a father forgiving his son's spendthriftness and greed. In The Parable of the Prodigal Son, the elder son says he never transgressed. He did not mean to hurt his father. He did not do what he was told.
A young man prays fervently for deliverance from an overpowering temptation, but the struggle never seems to end. The more he prays, the worse the temptation becomes. And so we cry out with the Psalmist, “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 1. The Heart Has Eyes. At this point we come face to face with the crucial importance of good theology.
The Rolling Stones - 'Prodigal Son'(early mix, with foot stomp in right channel)bootleg - Duration: 3:08. Rollover1970 45,708 views. A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Please discuss further on the. Prodigal Sun Solar energy was a rising star in the '70s -- until it was banished by the powers that be. Are we ready for its return? Arthur Allen March/April 2000 Issue.
We need to be reminded that an astounding miracle lies at the heart of our faith. We believe something absolutely incredible—that a man who was dead came back to life on the third day.
Now if God would do that for his Son, indeed if God has the power to raise the dead, who are we to question God’s power to change the hardest hearts? You can’t start with what your eyes see or what you can figure out. And you can’t trust your feelings in something like this because your emotions can play tricks on you. We must therefore start with God who can raise the dead, not with the person who is spiritually dead. If it is God alone who can raise the dead, then our focus must be on God alone. Here are three verses that will help us as we think about praying for our prodigals: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life” (Proverbs 4: 2. NIV).“The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, Like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wishes” (Proverbs 2.
He has been called the godfather of shock-rock, mixing elements of horror movies into acts that have included an unpalatable array of guillotines, fake blood, baby dolls and boa constrictors. Yet many would be surprised to. Elizabeth was a 70something new friend who exhibited an unshakable trust in God. I was a young woman in search of a mentor. When I asked what contributed most to her strong and lively prayer life, she said, “More. The musical tale of two brothers and one wastefully extravagant father. A new musical experience based on the familiar parable as seen through the eyes of the elder brother.
NKJV).“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened” (Ephesians 1: 1. NASB). When Paul speaks of “your heart,” he’s not referring to the organ in your chest that pumps blood throughout your body.
The term “heart” refers to what we might call “the real you,” the place inside where the decisions of life are made. The heart is the place where you decide what values you will live by and what direction you will go and how you will live your life each day.
Our Hearts. Every important decision you make starts in your heart. And your heart has eyes that can be open or closed. When the eyes of your heart are closed to the light of God, you stumble blindly through life, making one dumb choice after another.
Because the eyes of your heart are shut and you lack moral vision. The light of God is shut out of your life. That means you can see and be blind at the same time. That is, you can have 2. God. There are lots of people like that in the world.
Physically they can see but spiritually they are totally blind. Get off the Bench and Into the Game. If our young people sleep around, or if they get drunk on the weekends, if they cheat and cut corners, if they are rebellious and unmotivated, those things are only symptoms of a deeper, more fundamental issue. They’ve never made a personal commitment to get serious about Jesus Christ. They’re sitting on the bench when they ought to be in the game. And I tell you this with total certainty, once you get into the game, once Christ becomes the center of your life, no one will have to tell you not to sleep around, and no one will have to tell you, “Don’t get drunk on the weekends.” You just won’t do it.
Once the eyes of your heart are opened, the light of God’s truth will come flooding in and you’ll never look at anything the same away again. Sometimes we worry too much about the symptoms without dealing with the root issues of life. We should pray, “Open the eyes of their heart, Lord,” because when that happens, life will radically change. They will grab their helmet and get in the ballgame for the Lord. They’ll go to the huddle and say, “You call the play, Lord. I’m ready to do whatever you say.”“I Just Don’t See It”Opening blind eyes is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. He and he alone can do it.
But he can do it, and this is the source of our hope. We must pray for the lost that God will open their eyes, give life in place of death, enable them to hear, create within them a desire to understand, give them a hunger for Jesus, and then grant them faith to believe the gospel. In short, as we prepare to share Christ with others, we must fervently pray that God will go before us.
When we pray for the lost, we are saying to God, “You go first! If you don’t go first, all our efforts will be in vain.”This is why we pray for our children and grandchildren and for our family members and for friends and loved ones who today are far from God. As our children grow older, we discover over and over again how little control we have over them.
We cannot compel their obedience because we cannot compel their hearts. How To Pray. But we can pray and cry out to God and say, “O Lord, open the eyes of their heart. Help them to see the light of truth.” If you have a prodigal daughter, pray like this: “Lord, open the eyes of her heart so that she can see Jesus.” That prayer is so simple and yet so profound.
Apart from God’s grace, we all have the same problem. Our hearts are closed and we cannot see the truth. Only God can open the eyes of the heart. When God opens those eyes, she will see the truth and light from heaven will come flooding in.
Do not focus on her going to hell. Focus your prayers on God and his power to change her heart. Ask our Father to do what only he can do—open the eyes of her heart so that she will come to know him. A Mother’s Tears. One of my favorite stories about the power of prayer to reclaim a prodigal is over 1.
It begins with a woman named Monica. Monica and her husband had three children. Two of them followed Christ but one son left the faith of his childhood. By his own admission, he chose the path of worldly pleasure. For many years he lived with a mistress and together they gave birth to a son out of wedlock. He broke his mother’s heart by joining a religious cult. Monica prayed for 1.
Christ and to the church. Looking back, her son said that she watered the earth with her tears for him.
She fasted and prayed and asked God to save her son. One day she went to see the bishop and with tears asked why her son was still living in sin. The bishop replied with words that have become famous across the centuries: “It is not possible that the son of so many tears should perish. Your son will be saved.” He was right.
It took several more years of fervent praying but eventually Monica’s son came to Christ. We know him today as St. He is universally regarded as one of the greatest thinkers in Christian history. He makes it clear in his Confessions that his mother prayed him to Jesus. She would not give up and eventually God answered her prayers.
Prayer—God’s Ordained Means. Please do not misunderstand. I do not believe that our prayers contain merit in and of themselves. But God has ordained both the means and the ends of salvation. And the two chief means of salvation are fervent prayer and the proclamation of his Word. We pray because everything depends on God, and we preach because the gospel is the power of God for salvation. Your prayers are part of heaven’s plan to reach out to the prodigals in your life and bring them back to God.
If you are heavily burdened for a loved one, you may be sure that that burden does not come simply from yourself. The burden is a gift from God, a token of his mercy toward the prodigal who at this moment cares nothing for the Lord.
Your prayers are thus an indispensable link in the chain of God’s purposes.