God wants us to pray without ceasing, but what do we pray about? And how do we pray correctly?

We often pray for what we see, instead of digging deeper and praying for the root of an issue. God wants us to dig deeper.

For instance, I was recently praying for someone to accomplish something that I knew they needed to do, but God showed me that I needed to pray for them to develop discipline because the lack of it was affecting many areas of their life. I would have prayed for the one area I saw, but God saw much more deeply than I did.

Another time I was praying for someone concerning some problem behavior that I saw, but God showed me that the root of their problem was self-rejection and that I needed to pray for them to know how much God loved them. 

If you are unsure of the root problem or what to pray for in any particular situation, you may want to say to God:
“I love You, Lord, and I wait on You for direction in my prayers today.”

The Holy Spirit will lead us into amazing adventures in prayer if we will simply ask Him what to pray, wait for Him to answer.

If you lose peace when you do or say something, God is speaking to you. One of the ways He lets us know how He feels about what we are doing is by either giving peace as approval or withdrawing it as disapproval. Anytime we lose our peace, we must stop and be sensitive to what God is saying to us.

Peace serves as a compass in our hearts, pointing us in the right direction.

We must follow peace.

Many times, instead of turning to Him in prayer, we turn to other people, mistakenly thinking that telling them all about what happened will comfort us, but it doesn’t.

Talking about something that hurts us only stirs up the pain in our emotions and makes it more difficult to overcome. This is one of my personal struggles: I tend to do everything I can think of before turning to God, and nothing ever changes the situation.

One of the ways I try to ask for God’s help is by praying, “God, I need you to comfort me. I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t want to get bitter or develop resentment. I’ve experienced this same kind of pain before and I don’t want my day to be ruined by it. But I’m having trouble handling it and I have to have Your help.”

It’s important that we totally depend on God, and let Him know that we need Him more than anyone or anything.

He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honor him. (PSALM 91:15)