Prayer Thought for the Month

My regular, as opposed to spontaneous, prayers each day include grace at each meal as well as the Lord’s Prayer and one prayer devoted to each of the four classic categories, spelling A-C-T-S:  one for adoration, one for confession, one for thanksgiving, and one for supplication.  I’m not bragging, by the way — far from it, since none of these prayers is very long, and I probably should be praying a lot more than I do.

Now, I used to do the Lord’s Prayer and A-C-T-S all at one time in the evening.  But that practice has changed over the years, so that now first thing in the morning I say the Lord’s Prayer, adoration, and supplication; confessional prayer around the middle of the day; and thanksgiving in the evening.

My thought is that, while I didn’t consciously plan it this way, that sequence makes some sense and you might ask whether it would work for you, too.  Consider:  When you think about it, the Lord’s Prayer feels like a morning prayer since it is seems to be contemplating what’s needed coming up.  For the same reason, it makes sense to focus on supplication early in the day.  And adoration helps put one in the right frame of mind, beginning the day with some conscious thought about how amazing God is.

On the other hand, if you’re lucky — and I count myself as very blessed — you’ll have a lot to thank God for at the end of the day, if you consider all He gave you, and if you bear in mind, too, all the evil that might have happened but did not.  So evening is a good time for thanksgiving.

As for confessing in the middle of the day:  Well, it’s in our waking hours that we do all our sinning, is it not?  Stopping and confessing in the middle of that makes a lot of sense, and pausing and thinking about our sinning might even prompt you to stop some of it.  And consider as well what is probably the most common and consistently committed sin of all, namely not keeping God foremost in your thoughts.  Confessing that sin midday, as we all probably could and should, may have a self-corrective effect.