10 Benefits of Prayer

What is is that prayer does for you?  Why do we pray?  There are so many benefits to prayer in our lives.  From being healthier to being closer to God, making time for prayer is an essential part of any Christian's life:

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1. Brings You Closer to God

Our prayer time is our time with God.  We can spend time in church, we can read our Bibles and even have a pile of devotionals next to our bed, but there is nothing that substitutes for good one-on-one time with the Lord.  Prayer enhances your relationship with Him so that He is reflected in every other part of your life. After all, think of how close you are to your friends and family.  We become close by revealing parts of ourselves. Yet no other human knows you as well as God, and He keeps all of our secrets.  He is the One we can reveal all parts of ourselves to, and He loves us no matter what.

2. Brings Divine Help

God is everywhere and in everything, but sometimes He wants to be asked for help.  Prayer can bring divine help into our lives when we need it most - and not just for us.  We can pray that others receive the help they need.  We can pray for divine peace.  God intervening often begins with a prayer of need.  Before you pray, think of the people in your life who need God's intervention, including yourself.  What are people struggling with in their own lives.  Where does hope seem lost and only God's intervention can redeem a situation. It's amazing how God will move in those situations when we lift them up to Him.

3. Keeps Our Selfishness in Check

As humans we are selfish.  When we pray, it helps to keep our selfishness in check - especially if we remember to keep others in our prayers.  Sometimes God allows us to see ourselves more clearly through our prayers.  Think about how many times our prayers are only centered on ourselves verses on those we love…or even others in the world.  When we add others to our prayers, we find ourselves being less selfish in the other areas of our lives.

 

4. Gain Forgiveness

When we pray, we open ourselves up to forgiveness.  There are no perfect people.  There are only those who strive to be the best they can be.  So we all slip up from time to time.  When we do, it is a great time to go to God in prayer to ask for forgiveness and direction.  It is also during that time of prayer that God can lead us to forgiving ourselves.  Sometimes we struggle with letting ourselves off the hook when God already has.  We can beat ourselves up a little too much or hold on too tightly to the bad things.  Through prayer, God can lead us to liking ourselves again.

5. Gives us Strength

God provides us a great deal of strength through prayer.  It helps sometimes to know someone is there for us, especially someone like God. He gives us direction that offers strength.  He provides help through other people that gives us strength.  Sometimes He just changes our perception of things or directly intervenes.  Any way we look at it, knowing that he is there gives us the strength and ability to stand up to anything that comes against us.

 

6. Improves our Attitude

Humility is a huge part of our faith, and prayer allows us to be humbled daily.  Through prayer we can see the world as the big place that it is, and we realize then how small our problems can be.  This is especially true when we pray in gratitude for what we've been given.  After all, our daily small problems may seem huge at the time, but when we pray for what others in the world are going through we see them for what they are.  Also, when we pray positively, we can find God changing our attitude from something negative to something far more positive

7. Offers Us Hope

When we get down in the dumps, prayer gives us hope.  Laying all of our  problems at God's feet opens us up to trusting Him. When we trust God, we have hope that things will turn out fine.  Having hope doesn't always mean things will turn out the way we want them to, but it can mean that things will turn out how God wants them to, which is sometimes even better than we ever could have imagined.  Also, prayer helps us see things clearly, which opens us up to all kinds of opportunities we may never have seen before.

8. Reduces Stress

When we lay our troubles at God's feet, we can feel the weight of the world come off of our shoulders.  When we trust in God to hear our prayers, our stress levels go down.  He has a way of bringing calm into our lives, even when we're in the middle of a storm.  We live in a pressure-filled world, where we are constantly being bombarded by responsibility and pressure to succeed.  No matter how young or old, stress is always there.  It comes from different places as we age, but it's still part of our lives.  Yet when we turn over those pressures to God in prayer, we find that our stress levels go down.

9. Can Make Your Healthier

There are a number of studies out there that show a link between prayer and emotional and physical health.  Some studies showed a significant decrease in heart disease, emphysema and cirrhosis of the liver for people who attended church once or more a week.  Other studies show worship was linked to lower blood pressure and a strengthening of the immune system.

10. Can Give You Better Understanding of Yourself

When we talk to God, we can hear the way we talk about ourselves.  We can hear all the bad things we say about ourselves and all the ways we wish we were better. We can hear our own hopes and dreams and how we want our lives to turn out.  God gives us those times to hear ourselves and gain a better understanding of who we are in Him.  He shows us our purpose and direction.  He shows us unconditional love, and demonstrates that we need to love ourselves more.  It is through prayer that we can see the person God sees.

 source about.com