Keeping a prayer journal can be a great aid in building your faith. Journaling your prayers is so helpful in keeping track of what you have prayed for as well as serving to remind you of prayer needs as they arise. The journal can become a wonderful recorded testimony of the Lord’s faithfulness in your life as prayer requests become answered.
Keeping a prayer journal doesn’t just help keep track of prayer requests but serves as a testimony of your progressing walk with the Lord. Every now and then I’ll look back at my older writings. Sometimes I’m able to see my faults in hind sight and learn from the mistakes I’ve made. I can see my cries to God when my faith was at its lowest and I can find times where the Lord had revived my spirit and filled me with joy.
Some tips I found helpful in my prayer journal:
- I find writing down dates is so important for future reference.
- I try my best to keep an organized format of writing so I’m not thumbing through messy jumbled notes later.
- I try to keep prayer needs together. For example, I might write down a friend’s specific need for prayer, but rather than filling the page with additional prayer requests, might use whatever remaining room for anything I feel the Lord puts on my heart, updates, or answers to prayer for that situation.
- In between prayer request for others, I tend to journal my own thoughts and outpourings to God.
- I try and remember to go back to the prayers that haven’t received answers and continue to pray.
That’s pretty much it. It’s really so simple. Everyone organizes themselves a bit differently. I use one of those cheap college ruled notebooks for my journaling. I find this to work best for me since I can tear out pages, lay the book flat, and the pages themselves are large enough to write a lot of subject matter on. If you are like me and don’t have the best memory, I hope you will find the concept of a prayer journal beneficial to you.