Are you struggling to maintain a consistent prayer life? Do you start strong but playing yourself falling off track? You’re not alone. Prayer is meant to be a powerful connection with God, but life often gets in the way, leaving us distracted and unmotivated. In this episode, I’m going to share some practical tips as virtual insights that will help you stick rounded, stay consistent and transform your prayer life into a daily life-giving habit. Let’s dive in together and discover how to strengthen your faith through a consistent prayer.

Today we’re diving into something so many of us struggle with. How to build a consistent prayer life. We all know that prayer is essential for growing our relationship with God.But let’s get real. Life gets in the way. Stractions creep in.And sometimes we just don’t know how to stay consistent. Whether you’re starting out on your prayer journey or even praying for years and feels stuck, this is the episode for you. I’m going to share some powerful but practical strategies that will help make prayer a regular life-changing part of your day.But first, let’s talk about how to come obstacles that might be holding you back. So let’s get started.

What are some obstacles that we face when we’re trying to maintain a consistent prayer life?

One of them is our busy schedules.We think that we’re too busy. We have kids and we got work and we’ve got all this adulting to do, paying bills and cleaning the house. And we think that we don’t have time for anything else in our lives. We don’t have time to stay connected with God. But that is just an obstacle. We can always find time in our all these pockets of time waiting in line or in your car on your way to work or in the restroom.There are all these tiny pockets of time that we can find where we could just say a prayer.

And then there’s distractions, technologies, social media, custom notifications that are disrupting our quiet focus, that quiet focus that we need to pray. We think we need this whole big period of time.But we need to just set aside time every day, like an appointment, make an appointment with yourselves to sit down and pray. And to put your phone in another room, put it on, do not disturb. Part of a pocket of time that is your prayer time and nobody is to disturb you.Whether you go into a closet or maybe you go into your car where nobody is paying to disturb you. Or you just do it while the kids are at school. Or you do it while you’re at work, you stay after work or you do it before work.But we have to carve out those periods of time, those periods of quiet so that we can pray. We lack motivation. At times we may feel spiritually drained and uninspired and we left the desire to pray.That’s when we should pray all the more. Because that’s when something is blocking us from praying. It’s blocking our relationship with God.And we need to go to God and vent all of our frustrations, vent what’s going on in our lives. He is a good listener. Then we feel unworthy or inadequate.Guilt or shame over past mistakes creates a sense of distance with God. We don’t focus on the fact that we are loved, that we are forgiven, that we are righteous in Christ. Because we’re not dwelling on that, we feel the shame and the guilt of all of our past sins and all of our past mistakes.And we’re dwelling on our past mistakes instead of dwelling on what God did for us.

And then we have unclear prayer goals. Not having a clear direction or purpose in prayer can make it so repetitive and aimless, leading to inconsistency.When we feel like we’re not getting anywhere in our prayers, that we don’t have anything to pray about, we need to focus on being grateful, grateful for what we have, grateful for God’s promises. We need to pray the word and we need to make sure that even though we don’t feel like praying and we don’t feel like we have a direction, that we are consistently showing up in our prayer time and praying the word pray it over your life, pray it over your family’s life, pray it over people that have wronged you. 

And then we have doubts or a lack of faith.God hasn’t answered our prayers. We don’t feel like our prayers are hitting the ceiling. We don’t feel like He’s heard us because the things in our lives don’t feel like they are changing and that causes us to doubt or to feel like our prayers are useless.But we got to keep praying, pray the promises, remind yourself of the promises and know that even when God is silent He is still working everything around for our good. 

And then we have fatigue or burnout. Physical and emotional exhaustion can make it difficult to find the energy or concentration for meaningful prayer.

And then there’s unresolved guilt or sin. We’re carrying around that unresolved sin or guilt and it blocks us from our relationship with God. It’s not anything on God’s end.He’s not preventing you from speaking to Him. He’s not sharing your prayers because of uncompressed sin. It has nothing to do with that.It has to do with how you feel and you focusing on that sin and that guilt instead of focusing on what Jesus did for us at the cross. Confess your sin, Jess. But confession is not to be forgiven because we are already forgiven.It’s confession is for us to cleanse our souls, to not cleanse it in. In a you’re not going to heaven if you don’t confess way, but it is for us because it makes us feel better. It’s like when you have a guilty conscience because you do something wrong and you go in and admit it and you feel a whole lot better, that’s the situation.

And then we over complicate prayer. We think that prayer has to be perfect and we have to follow certain rituals. We have to bow our heads.We have to get down on our knees. We got to do all these things. But when you pray, no matter what position you’re in, no matter where you are, He will hear you when you pray.And then we have spiritual drawing as periods where we don’t feel God’s presence. We don’t feel that our prayers are being answered and we just basically go, it’s not even worth it. But we have to stick with it.

What are some ways to maintain a consistent prayer life?

The first one I’ve already alluded to, it’s to set a daily prayer time. Whether that is in the morning before all the rest of the family wakes up or whether it’s after they go to bed or whether it’s on your break at work or your lunch at work, whether it is in your car on the way home to work or to work, we need to set an appointment on our calendar, an unmovable appointment. Just like if you’ve had an appointment with a doctor or a lawyer or to get your car fixed, you need to set an appointment every day that is unmovable.We have to treat God as if he were one of our friends, our best friend, that we would move heaven and earth to go see if they wanted to meet. We need to express our heart as if God is our best friend. Then all of our frustrations and our worries and our fears, talk to him about our dreams and pray the promises over your family and your friends and yourself and treat God like you would your best friend.You wouldn’t come to your best friend and call the person by Mrs. So-and-so. We come to God a lot of the times and with death is religious error about us. We’re calling him Heavenly Father when he is Abba Father.So we’re calling him Father when we should be calling him Daddy. There is a intimacy when we call him Abba Father, when we call him Daddy because we’re closer to him if we call him Daddy. There is more intimate relationship and we need to vent to him.We need to make sure that we’re taking down the guards, the walls and we are letting him in to our lives and sharing our lives with him and letting him help us.

And then we need to create a prayer space. Designate a quiet distraction-free area where you can focus and connect with God.Whether that’s your prayer closet or maybe it’s your car or maybe it’s the bathroom. Maybe you do this in the shower every day but we need to have that quiet place that we can commune with God that we can talk to him that we could make sure that we are going to visit every day. Maybe you’ve got a devotional book that you read.Maybe you have a chapter in the Bible that you read and let the Holy Spirit speak to you about it.

That’s another thing we don’t do is we do a lot of praying, a lot of talking but we don’t do a lot of listening. We need to be quiet in our spirits and we need to listen to what God has to say to us.We need to listen because it’s a two-way communication and if we don’t listen we are never going to understand God’s heart and what he is trying to tell us.

And we need to start small and build up. Don’t overwhelm yourself by aiming for long prayer sessions.I remember there was this preacher who used to preach about we need to tear in one hour. We need to pray one hour every day but that is not practical. It’s not practical if you’re not a preacher or a missionary to pray for one hour a day.Now you could pray for one hour a day splitting it up into 15 minutes here, 10 minutes there but we need to start small, 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there and we have to start out with a few minutes a day and then gradually increase the time so that it becomes a habit because if we don’t do small steps and we tell ourselves we’re going to pray for an hour that’s where we’re going to run into trouble. That’s why we’re not consistent because there’s always something that will distract us from doing that. Something that we think we should be doing in that hour that we think is more productive.

We need to use a prayer journal. Writing down our prayers or reflections and our answered prayers keeps us engaged and helps us focus and it reminds us of God’s faithfulness. We have a chronicle of God’s faithfulness our lives and I like to write out my prayers to God because as a writer I find that I communicate better through the written word.That doesn’t mean that I don’t speak to God. It just means that a lot of times especially when I’m angry and I can’t seem to articulate the words. Writing it out works.God can read it. God knows what you’re saying. God knows what you’re saying when you just crying in his presence or you sigh.He’s got it. He understands. He understands us better than we understand ourselves but a lot of times we think that we have to communicate through our voice what it is that we need and what it is that we are trying to say but God understands your writing.God understands your crying. God understands you sign. God understands it when you can’t speak because you’re so frustrated

And we need to incorporate the scripture into our prayer. We need to pray the word. You’re sick. You need to pray healing scriptures.You need money. You need to pray scriptures about finances. You don’t know what to do.You need to pray scriptures about guidance and wisdom but we need to be praying the scriptures not only because it reminds God of his word but it reminds us of his word. It’s when we pray the scriptures were meditating on those scriptures and Joshua 1:8 says that if we meditate on them day and night we will have great success. We need to incorporate scripture into our prayers.We need to be praying that God’s going to turn everything around for our good. We need to be praying that the battle is not ours but God’s. We need to be praying his word that by Jesus’ stress we are healed.We need to be praying that we are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. We need to be praying that the Lord is our Shephard. We shall not want and we need to be praying the 91st Psalm over our lives every day.I have seen tremendous miracles because of doing that every day so I encourage you to pray the 91st Psalm every day. I encourage you to pray the Jabez prayer every day because my life has changed dramatically since I started doing that.

And then we need to pray throughout the day. This is one of the things that I learned was that you could have an ongoing conversation with God throughout your day.I’ll be working on a prescription at work because I’m a pharmacy tech and something will be frustrating about it or a patient is yelling at me and I will say, Lord could you please help me with this and inevitably he will help fix the problem but to many times we think that we cannot have an ongoing conversation with God but that’s exactly what we need. Lord I need wisdom in the situation. Lord I need supernatural provision.Lord I know that your word says that you’re going to turn this around for my good Lord I thank you that I have favor with this person over here. We need to have an ongoing conversation. We need to pray whatever we encounter a problem in our lives we need to start praying. Norman Vincent Peele talks about taking God as your partner and what should you do that? He’s your invisible partner. I don’t want to say his silent partner because he will talk if you listen. He will guide and direct you if you listen.He can put in his input if we just ask him and so we take God as our partner and we speak to him throughout the day. We listen for his clues. We listen to what he is guiding our spirit to do but too many times we are having this conversation and only limiting it to our prayer time or our church time.We are not having this ongoing conversation with him and you become more intimate with God once you start having this ongoing conversation when you’re speaking to him throughout the day 

And you can join a prayer group. You can join an intercessory prayer group at your church. You can go to prayer night at your church.You can’t get a prayer partner. Somebody in the church who is willing to partner with you and you pray for the church, you pray for your friends, you pray for the prayer requests in the church.

And then we need to set reminders. If we’re going to have technology we should let it help us with this.We can set reminders on our phones so that the alarm goes off so that we can pray at a certain time throughout the day.

And we have to incorporate praise into our prayer life. Praise meaning that even when it’s tough we’re going to praise God. We’re going to sing his praises.We’re going to thank God for all that he has done in our lives and all that he promises to do in our lives. We’re going to sing when things are tough and we don’t know how we’re going to get out. We’re going to be like Paul and Silas in the prison in chains but we’re still going to praise him.We’re still going to sing in the midst of our trouble. We’re going to be like the Shunammite woman whose child had died and she went to go find Elisha and when the servant of Elisha asked her if everything was okay she said all as well because she had faith in her God or like the Hebrew children who were in the fire and they said that God was going to come through for them. They believed in God that he was going to bring them through.We need to make sure that our faith is in God and that we remind ourselves of his promises but we need to have the shout of victory because praise and thanksgiving are the highest form of faith. That is evidence that we have put our faith in God and nothing can sway us from that faith because we know that God is faithful and that he is going to come through.

And like I said we need to be honest with God because a lot of times we think that we can only come to him with positive things but we don’t have to just be positive. We can tell him how we feel.We can tell him how frustrated we are that it doesn’t look like he’s coming through. We can tell him all those negative thoughts that are coming through our minds. We can tell him what we believe about him.He is not going to turn against us. He is never going to turn his back on us but we need to be honest because if we’re not honest it blocks our intimacy with God. It blocks our prayer life because we are holding back.

And we need to persevere through the dry seasons. When it doesn’t feel like our prayers are hitting the ceiling, when it doesn’t feel like anything’s happening, we have to know that God is in control and that he is still on this throne and that he’s turning everything around for our good but it’s the wrong timing. He’s got everything in process but it hasn’t got to us because it’s the wrong timing. God has exact timing and we don’t want the answer to the prayer any sooner or later than that exact timing because it’s going to turn out to be a failure.We need a breakthrough. We need a miracle. We need a turnaround but we can’t have that until it’s the right timing and we need to consistently show up because the thing is that we give up too easily.We give up right before our breakthrough, right before our miracle, right before our turnaround. We give up right before and if we would just persist things would turn around.

We need to set aside time every day to pray.We need to have an ongoing conversation with God as we go throughout our day. We need to create a prayer space. We need to start small.We need to use a prayer journal. We need to pray the word. We need to set reminders on our phones, find a prayer partner.We need to be honest with God, persevere through those dry seasons. We need to pray in solitude. We need to pray with persistence and we need to pray for God’s will to be done instead of ours and we need to pray with gratitude because this is how we’re going to build a consistent prayer life.What has your experience been? What ways have you used to build a consistent prayer life? Drop them in the comments below. We’d love to hear your stories and we’d love to hear your struggles with your prayer life. Until next time, God bless.

nor of the pestilence that walks in the darkness, nor of the destruction that lays waste at noon day.

What does that mean? It means that even the things that are hidden, the things that mean to harm us, God sees them. God sees what’s hidden.God sees what comes down the path. God sees what we’re going to encounter, and He has a solution. For everything we encounter, we just need to trust that he sees what we don’t. He sees that accident and prevents us from getting into it. He sees what that person is going to do to us and gives us a bad feeling about them. He sees everything and he sees what is hidden .He sees what we don’t see.

You shall not be afraid for the terror by night nor the arrow that flies by day.

What does that mean? It means that we don’t need to be afraid. We don’t need to be afraid of what comes against us.We don’t need to be afraid of pandemics and diseases. We don’t need to be afraid of financial problems and losing our jobs because we’ve got a God who sees our need. A God who is God. He is for us and not against us. A God who will turn everything around for our good. But we just have to trust him.Trust that He is going to come through. Trust that He sees us and we are not forgotten. And that He will do what he promised He will do.