Morning prayer is a great way to start your day off by communicating with and thanking God. It’s a time to give Him the first part of your day and to ask Him to guide you throughout the day.
Morning prayer is a time when you choose to focus the first part of your day on the most important person in your day – the God of the universe who exists in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Morning prayers can consist of thankfulness, requests for guidance, and wisdom throughout your day. It can also be a time to set your mind toward the things that really matter and help you prioritize the activities of your day. Morning prayer can set a spiritual and positive tone for your entire day.
Morning Prayer Tips, But Not a Formula For a Prayer
I also want you to realize that, although these are ten points that you can use sometimes in your morning prayer, this is not a formula. You can make your prayer a short prayer that God knows is filled with your heart’s cry to love Him and enjoy a life of abiding in Christ.. Or, you can pray for a longer period of time. That is between you and God.
Another practice you might want to consider that actually takes very little time but is very rewarding is spiritual journaling. It will help you keep up with your prayer requests and thoughts about what God is saying to you.
Toward the end of this post, I will end with the audio of a song from quite a few years ago that I wrote and sang in my first trip to a recording studio. You will notice that it is short, to the point, and was from my heart. God wants to hear and communicate with our hearts to his heart.
The following ten points are ideas that can be good to include in some of your morning prayers. It’s not that God wants you to say every one of those every morning. These are simply some ideas that have come to me over the years.
This isn’t prayer formula. However, some of the ideas might encourage you as you start or continue to develop a time of morning prayer in your Christian life.
Morning Prayer – 10 Reasons Why It’s the Best Way To Start Your Day
1. Praying in the morning sets the tone for your day.
It allows you to start your day with the most important person in your life, your Heavenly Father. Acknowledge Jesus as Lord and pray that the Holy Spirit will work in you to live a life of joy that will encourage others as well. Some people use a prayer journal. It can be as simple as a small notebook or an actual book made to be a prayer journal.
2. Morning prayer is a great way to start your day by giving thanks to God.
Thank Him for all that He has done for you. Gratitude is one characteristic of a growing Christian that we should practice every day. Sometimes we may do well at it and other times we may not. Just make a commitment to listen to the Holy Spirit and let Him prompt you about gratitude on a daily basis.
As an aside, there are some really good apps on your phone that will remind you in the morning and the evening to express gratitude for God and what He has done.
3. Ask God for a Mindset of Prayer For the Day.
We can’t necessarily pray all day in what we think is the traditional sense of prayer. However, we can grow to where we can be in a mindset of prayer, or an attitude of prayer, even when we are working, going to school, etc. The Bible tells us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:16). We can communicate with God at any time during the day. You don’t need to have your head bowed and your eyes closed as we sometimes may think.
He simply wants to have a relationship filled with communication with Him. I don’t think we have a clue of how much God wants us to have a consistent and informal dialogue with Him all through the day.
That doesn’t mean a flippant dialogue. It can be one of respect and honor, but still in a loving and conversational tone where we share our thoughts with Him throughout the day. And, very importantly, ask God to help you listen to Him throughout your day.
It’s been said that when you pray in the morning, you are more likely to remember to pray throughout the day as well. That is a very good reason to start the morning with prayer.
4. Ask God To Prompt You To Think More about His Plans Than Yours
Morning prayer can encourage you to think of your day more in terms of God’s plan for your life during that day, rather than personal wants and desires for that day. As we grow in Christ His desires for your day and your desires for your day should be similar.
5. Ask God to Remove Fear and Anxiety
Morning prayer is a great way to ask God to rid you of any anxiety or worry that you may be feeling or expecting for the day ahead. Use that time of morning prayer to allow you to focus on His faithfulness and protection. Know that what God says about your life is infinitely more important than what your emotional fear and anxiety tell you. Give Him your fears in the morning and trust Him to walk with you all day.
6. It Can Help You Avoid Temptations and Distractions
Morning prayer can help you to avoid unnecessary distractions and be proactive about any temptations throughout the day. God doesn’t want us to go through our day being anxious that our spiritual lives will go off the rails or that we will fall into a great sin that day. However, if you are a Christian, you can know that He has given you all the power over temptation that you need. You have power over sin that will allow you to walk in more spiritual freedom.
7. It’s a Great Time To Ask For His Wisdom For The Day.
Morning prayer is a great time to ask God for His wisdom for the day ahead. It’s very subtle, but sometimes our human minds can get the concepts of knowledge and wisdom confused. We may have quite a bit of knowledge about the tasks that we will be facing in our jobs or other activities of the day.
However, we need to specifically ask God to give us wisdom in how we make decisions about the knowledge we have. As we well know, sometimes we can do the right thing, but do so using the wrong method or the wrong type of communication. Asking God to give you wisdom for the day is a great part of morning prayer.
8. Ask God to Speak and Demonstrate the Christ Life To Others.
Ask God to enable us to speak to people in a manner that will demonstrate with our words and deeds that we are Christian believers and are entrusting our lives to the God of the Bible. We never want to be rude or condescending, but able to speak the truth about any situation with the type of love that Jesus would display.
9. Acknowledge That If You Have Setbacks or Failures, He Is Still Holding You
We don’t want to assume that we are going to fail or make wrong decisions every day. However, because we are still in these human bodies, we will certainly fail from time to time. It’s good to agree with God if you make a mistake or spiritually stumble. Confess your sin and trust Him to guide you in whatever you should do. Sometimes it may be nothing. At other times you may need to apologize to someone or make a relationship right.
Know that His love is unconditional and He has already paid for your mistakes on the cross. If you stumble and fall as a Christian, you don’t have to stay down.
9. Thank God For The Incredible Grace of God That You Have Received
Try to always remember to thank God for His unmeasurable grace that you have received and will continue to receive. Give Him the praise that He does not judge your goodness or righteousness based on your good deeds or how you perform. Your acceptance in Christ is based on the grace given to you by God because of what the Lord Jesus Christ has done for you with His death, burial, and resurrection.
Don’t be motivated to do good things during the day by guilt – afraid that you might not please God. He loves you. Does he want us to love people and do good for others? Of course. However, that is not a pathway to getting Him to love us more.
When you accepted Christ as your Savior He adopted you into His family and His grace and righteousness cover you. He loves you unconditionally. That is one of the most important things to dwell on all through our day!
I would recommend you look at a blog post I recently saw. It’s called The Ultimate Morning Routine For Christian Moms. It’s from MindyJonesblog.com. I think it might give you other insights that I might not think of as a dad.
You Are Starting Your Day With a Person – A Relationship
I am typically not a good morning person at all. I don’t know if I inherited some kind of musician gene or just developed it in all of the late-night rehearsals and recording sessions through the years. But I’m more creative and productive later in the day.
However, some of you are morning people. You get up with rays of sunshine coming out of your pores and are ready to tackle your day!
But regardless of whether you consider yourself a morning person or not, just remember one thing. As you begin your day with God, you are not beginning with a set of rules, regulations, laws, and life formulas.
You are beginning your day with a person. The person just happens to be the most spectacular, powerful, almighty, sovereign God that has invited us into a relationship with Him. Sometimes, when I look at that concept through human eyes, I can’t figure out why He would want to hang out and have fellowship with me, but He really does.
“God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
1 Corinthians 1:9
We don’t become slaves of God when we become Christians. He wants us to love Him. He gives us free will which we will use sometimes to make the wrong choices. However, we become people who can have intimate closeness with Him. We have the same salvation by grace that Abraham did and he was called a friend of God.
“And so it happened just as the Scriptures say: ‘Abraham believed God, and God counted him as righteous because of his faith.’ He was even called the friend of God.”
James 2:23
I would encourage you to read the entire chapter of Romans 8 to see the depths of God’s love toward us. However, here are a couple of verses from that passage that absolutely can give you encouragement and strength. It will let you know how much He loves you and wants to have that daily relationship with Him – a living God. Not just a spiritual concept.
“And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[p] neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Romans 8:38-39
Also, sometimes in your private life, it is great to do the Lord’s Supper or Communion with God as a gesture of remembrance of what He has done and our love for Him.
Here are the lyrics to a song called, “Today.”
I wrote the lyrics of this song a few years ago as a morning prayer. I was a young man. It certainly doesn’t include every single thing that was stated in the paragraphs above. However, it served as a pretty good prayer and the song encouraged others to pray in the mornings.
“Today as I walk. Today as I talk to my brother, Lord give the words that I should say. Today, if I stumble, today if I fall, pick me up, Lord. Please guide my steps along the way.
Today I cannot make it on my own, and I can’t face the world alone.
Lord teach me how to lean on You. See me through today…As I walk.
Today as I talk to my brother, Lord tell me what to do and say.
Today I cannot make it on my own, and I can’t face the world alone.
Lord teach me how to lean on You. See me through today.
Lord teach me how to lean on You. See me through today.
Today – A Morning Prayer
A Morning Prayer Doesn’t Need to Be Complicated
I believe that morning prayer is a great way to start off your day with God. I hope you will think through some of the points we have mentioned. May some of them will be helpful to you.
Give God some time in the morning. Try to do so even if it’s not a very long time of prayer. Sincere morning prayer can do much to get your day started well!
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