One of my favorite things to teach kids is
prayer. When it comes to prayer, it is SO much more important to have
the right beliefs about prayer than it is to have the right words.
I use helium balloons to illustrate this.
We all know if we breathe in helium, our voices change. Kids always laugh when
their teacher or parent speaks after taking a deep breath of helium, and you
can use that to show them a good belief system about prayer.
When the Holy Spirit came into our life, we
breathed Him in (the word “spirit” in both Hebrew and Greek is also the word
for breath and wind). When we breathed Him in, He changed our voice. We don’t
sound like chipmunks, though, we sound like Jesus. God now treats our
prayers as if Jesus prayed them. The Holy Spirit inside us has made
our prayers just as powerful as His.
Another thing our kids need to know about
prayer is the answers they can expect from God. So many people teach that God
sometimes says “yes,” but sometimes “no,” and sometimes He even says
“wait.” This is not accurate when it comes to His promises and will
build a faulty foundation for prayer.
2 Corinthians 1:20 says that all His
promises are yes and amen. That means God won’t say “no” if He promised it. The
promise of protection, the promise of provision, the promise of healing, etc.
When we pray for these we can only get one answer…yes! Another verse on this is
1 John 5:14-15, which says, “This is the confidence which we have before Him,
that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know
that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we
have asked from Him.”
It’s important we remember that
Jesus never taught on what to do if our prayers aren’t answered. That’s because He never expected us to believe they
wouldn’t (after all, if we pray believing He won’t answer, we aren’t praying
with faith). He wants His disciples to pray the way He did, always knowing our
prayers are heard (see John 11:42).
As we teach our children, these three
thoughts will help them grow up praying with tremendous faith, and seeing God
do incredible things through their lives.
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