Harvest Prayer Challenge
Take the harvest prayer challenge: Pray for your people with this themed 10-day challenge, and pray for all the folks taking the challenge with you.
How it works
This is a simple prayer challenge. You will pray for the people in your life while focusing on a word for that day.
A themed prayer challenge gives you a word each day to meditate on and then pray specifics for each person you want to pray for. You let the spirit guide you on the actual specifics for each person.
Example
Let’s say my word for the day is love. And I’m praying for 3 people: my sweet Aunt Brunhilda, my once-close cousin Alfred who’s having temptations with alcohol abuse, and my neighbor who lost her dog. I might pray for Brunhilda that she grows in love towards God and all of her friends and that she feels uplifted because of the love of God during her day. I might ask for God to help Alfred repent and feel the love of Christ in his life. Then I might ask for my neighbor to remember her dog with love and have her loss be filled with good memories that she can share with others.
These are just simple imaginary examples. Have your prayers come from your heart and be unique. They can be short or long – the challenge isn’t about quantity. It’s just a way of changing up your prayer life for a few days.
Pray for the group
After you’ve prayed for each person, send up a quick prayer for everyone else who is taking the challenge – you don’t need specifics here since God knows everyone and is listening already.
Why? you may ask. Why pray for the group too?
Well, lately I’ve been hearing a lot of testimonials about amplified prayer (though they aren’t calling it that). I’m getting the sense that we need to do more together. And that our prayers together are powerful.
The idea is that we stand together in prayers – a threefold cord is not soon broken!
Ten Days of Prayer
I’m using the 10 days between the feast of Trumpets and the Day of Atonement which is in the fruit harvest season just before the harvest festival of tabernacles. These are biblical holy times set apart by God for his people. Most Christians don’t celebrate these days today, but God created them for the benefit of his people, and I happen to celebrate them with a Messianic interpretation.
Trumpets was a day of loud rejoicing (making loud blasts on the trumpets) and Atonement is a day of fasting where we are reconciled to God through the sacrifice of his lamb. (It’s actually two lambs on atonement, but I don’t want to get too technical here.) The point is that both days have symbolism that point to the redemption that Christ provides.
By tradition, the 10 days between these two feast days were marked as days of repentance, but that’s not explicitly in the bible. Nor is my 10-day prayer challenge – I’m totally making that up. It’s just a way for me to be mindfully approaching a big fast day. And I thought my prayer-oriented friends would like to join me in a prayer challenge.
Ten words
Here are the 10 words I’ve selected for this prayer challenge. One theme word per day. Most of these are from the fruit of the spirit, since I’ve chosen a Harvest overall theme. I’m putting them in an order I think I will use, but I may switch it up as I go along.
- joy
- peace
- patience
- kindness
- blessings
- forgiveness
- grace
- faith
- hope
- love
Blessings
A blessing to you as you take on this prayer challenge. And if it doesn’t coincide with my actual dates, may your prayers be blessed also. God loves the fragrant smell of our prayers.
This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. 1John 5:14
