Is there a simple way to deepen your prayer life?

Is there a simple way to deepen your prayer life? Yes. It requires discipline, time to pray (of course), and a desire to grow in godliness.

Suffering from cheesy prayers?  Do your prayers need challenging - to think through what it is exactly you're doing in prayer? How am I supposed to pray for an hour a day?  What do I do?

It was An Hour that Changes the World: A Practical Plan for Personal Prayer, by Dick Eastman. In it, he suggests that Christians should make it their aim to pray for an hour a day. He derives this suggestion from Matthew 26:40, where Jesus asks, “Could you not watch with me for one hour?”

Eastman says the best way to pray for an hour is to split up the hour into 12 blocks of five minutes, then pray with a timer, and pray through the different blocks, five minutes at a time. Now Eastman gives his 12 blocks of time (praise, waiting, confession, Scripture, watching, intercession, petition, thanksgiving, singing, meditation, listening, and the second round of praise):

So you may wish to change the 12 blocks. Here is what the list looks like now:

1. Praise
2. Confession
3. Thanksgiving
4. Intercession (things in my own life)
5. Petition (for others)
6. Missions
7. Church
8. Evangelism
9. Family
10. Scripture/Meditation
11. Prayer through the passage
12. Singing

So practically, this is what it looks like. 

1. Praise—if you are familiar with the ACTS acronym, the first twenty minutes basically follows that. I’ll spend five minutes praying in light of God’s attributes. I’ll focus on one or two that are particularly on my mind that day. For these five minutes, I try to pray like David in 2 Samuel 7:18-29.
2. Confession—Here I spend some time confessing sins to the Lord. I examine my heart and pray that God would reveal sins of both commission and omission, that I then bring before the Lord, confident of his forgiveness.
3. Thanksgiving—at around the ten-minute mark, I begin thanking God for things that he has done and prayers that he has answered. It actually takes self-control to hold this section off, as my thanksgiving often creeps into my praise. But I aim for it here.
4. Petition (my own life)—at this point, I pray for things for my own life. I ask for wisdom for what is going on at home, at church, or for events I have coming up even that day.
5. Intercession (for others)—I have a little journal that I’ve used to keep track of prayer requests from other people. I’ll spend time praying through it, or through our church’s prayer list. I keep this focused on others.
6. Missions—Here I pray for our church’s missionaries, and particularly for the ones that my wife and I support. Honestly, this is probably my favourite part of the hour. I love thinking about how the God who hears my prayers from Australia is the same God who rules the Chadian desert, the Genevan suburbs, and Bhutanese mountains. All the stars are above me, but under him, and I know that our missionaries in many ways depend on our prayers.
7. Church—After praying for our missionaries, I then pray for the two ministries I’m involved in my Church and Hope College Australia. I pray for our elders, and church unity. I pray for the professors and the students. This five minutes goes pretty fast.
8. Evangelism—Then I turn my attention to evangelistic opportunities. This is probably the hardest for me because these five minutes are the hardest to keep them from being redundant. It can easily seem that I’m praying for the same people day in and day out.
9. Family—I’ve added this section in the last few years. I’ve found it helpful to keep my prayers for my family all in one section. I pray for my three daughters, two sons in laws, for my wife, for our parenting. There is no shortage of stuff to pray for here.
10. Scripture Meditation—This is the first time I open the Bible; I’ve found that if I open it earlier, I have a hard time getting back to praying. I’ll read a Psalm or a prayer, or maybe a chapter from a prophet, and then just focus on what the Lord was doing in that prayer, and imagine how it was answered.
11. Scripture prayer—Then I’ll go back and spend five minutes praying through the passage I’d just been meditating on. Thanking God for what he did, and asking God for things in my own life that reflect on how I see his will in light of the chapter I’ve just spent five minutes meditating on.
12. Hymn—I’ll close by either singing (if I’m alone in the office) or by prying through the lyrics of a particular song or hymn.