This post is part of PrayerMate Amnesty Week. Yesterday we talked about how to actually get on and pray.

One of the things that can be a barrier to regular, faithful prayer for people is the feeling that our prayers are “stale”, that we’re just praying the same things over and over. One of the points that Don Carson makes in his wonderful book “A Call to Spiritual Reformation” is that this is one of the ways that praying Bible prayers for people can really help. Biblical prayers are often much bigger in scope than the things we sometimes ask God for – so instead of praying that their sick cat will get better, we pray that they might be rooted and established in Christ, and that they may truly grasp what is the height and breadth and depth of the love of God – huge, eternal prayers that there’s always room for growth in.

“Where shall we learn the will of God, the values of God, the character and purposes of God, the promises of God? We shall learn such things in the Scriptures he has graciously given us. But that means that when we pray, when we ask God for things, we must try to tie as many requests as possible to Scripture.”

Of course, it’s also helpful to pray some of those Biblical prayers into the specifics of people’s lives, and so it’s helpful to have some up-to-date prayer requests from people. Today we’re going to focus on three kinds of people that PrayerMate can help us pray for, and tomorrow we’ll focus on one final way it can help with praying for specific prayer requests.

Praying for mission organisations & churches

PrayerMate allows you to subscribe to regular prayer updates from all sorts of fantastic Christian organisations, including London City Mission, Open Doors, UCCF The Christian Unions & many more. There are also a growing number of local churches who publish their prayer diary through the PrayerMate.net website.

Praying for missionaries

As well as the subscriptions mentioned above, both versions of PrayerMate include a “prayer gallery” where you can do a one-off download of set prayers. OMF UK have very kindly donated a handy range of prayers to help you pray for missionaries. There’s a suggestion for each day of the week as well as some more general prayers. These can be used exactly as they are, or I suggest you customise them with the specific names and details of particular missionaries you’re supporting.

Husbands praying for their wives

Part of the responsibility of being husband is being faithful in prayer for your wife, the one nearest to you. In partnership with 10ofthose.com, you can download some sample prayers from the upcoming book “Water on the Word” by Andrew Case, designed to help husbands pray biblically for their wives.

Todays task: downloading some prayers

In the main “add” page (accessed by pressing the + button) you’ll find a section titled “Ready made content and organisations”. This is where you’ll get access to both the downloadable prayers and automatically updating “feeds”.

Let’s focus on the downloadable prayers today. Tap into the “World Mission & Bible Translation” category and then choose “OMF Missionary Prayer guide”. You can preview it first, then if you want to download it, tap the “Download prayer” action in the top right. This will begin the process of creating a new subject. Assign it to the list that makes most sense (perhaps “World Mission”). If you want, you could use the pencil icon on each card after you’ve downloaded them and replace Paul’s “I” with the name of your missionary friend.

Elsewhere in the Prayer Gallery you’ll also find some Bible prayers, or many suggested prayers for various family members.

Extra credit: subscribing to feeds

You might also find it helpful to subscribe to one or two feeds. Tap again to the “Add” page and find the “Ready made content and organisations” section. From here you can browse around various categories. One of the recent additions is the “Devotional” category, where you’ll find content from Scotty Smith’s “Heavenward” blog and Glen Scrivener. If you tap into a feed you’ll get further details, then you can tap the “Subscribe” action at the bottom. You’ll need to assign it to a list, then new content should start showing up automatically as it is published.