For the next few Tuesdays I’ll be sharing sneak previews from my soon-to-be-released book, Refresh Your Prayers, Uncommon Devotions to Restore Power and Praise, with you, my faithful readers. Thank you for your love, support, and PRAYERS as we send this book out into the world on March 1.

Sharing God’s Heart

I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

Ezekiel 36:26

I used to think the purpose of prayer was to change God’s mind—to persuade Him to do what I wanted Him to do. I assumed if I had to pray about something, it was because God wasn’t doing what needed to be done.

Oh, how wrong I was.

When we pray, something transformative happens. As we share our hearts with God and listen for Him to respond to us through His Word and the Holy Spirit, God opens the channel between our minds and His. When we confess our sin, we remove the debris that blocks the unhindered flow of thought, and we’re better able to understand Him and His ways. Oswald Chambers wrote in Christian Disciplines, “Prayer is . . . the means whereby we assimilate more and more of His mind.”

Instead of eavesdropping on God’s thinking, the Holy Spirit within us helps bring our thinking in line with God’s. This may seem improbable, but 1 Corinthians 2:16 affirms it. If we are God’s children, “we have the mind of Christ.”

But we don’t just have His mind; we have His heart. “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you,” God said through the prophet Ezekiel. “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). The more we get to know God, the more He transforms our hearts, thoughts, and desires.

Jennifer Kennedy Dean, in Live a Praying Life, describes the process this way: “It is through the ongoing and increasingly intimate communion with Him that our participation in the divine nature becomes solid and real. Through prayer, He is reproducing His heart in us.”

Most miraculous of all, as we become conformed to the image of God’s Son, our prayers become more powerful, because we pray according to His will and desires. We pray the prayers God is pleased to answer. We ask for what He wants to give us.

“This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him” (1 John 5:14–15).

How do we know what His will is? We get to know His mind and heart through prayer and God’s Word. Only Christians have the privilege of interacting with the God who not only created us but wants a relationship with us.

As we seek God in prayer, the Holy Spirit, who knows God’s mind, will be our teacher. He’ll shape and direct our prayers. He’ll transform them into petitions God delights to answer because they reflect His will.

In my early days of prayer, I approached God to change His mind. Now I come to Him so He can change mine.

Uncommon Power

Prayer transforms us and makes our hearts and minds more like God’s.

Praise Prompt

Heavenly Father, thank you for being a God who delights to share your thoughts, desires, and plans with us. What an amazing concept—that we can speak with the God of the universe, and you speak back. Thank you for inviting us into your heart and mind and making us more and more like yourself.

Live It Out

As you pray and read your Bible today, invite God to transform your heart and mind and make it more like His. Ask Him to help you love what He loves and hate what He hates. As you move through your day, filter your thoughts through the truth of God’s Word and adjust accordingly.

This devotion is an excerpt taken from Refresh Your Prayers: Uncommon Devotions to Restore Power and Praise by Lori Hatcher© 2022. Used by permission of Our Daily Bread Publishing®, Box 3566, Grand Rapids, MI 49501. All rights reserved. Further distribution is prohibited without written permission from Our Daily Bread Publishing® at permissionsdept@odb.org.

Does Your Prayer Life Need Refreshing?

We know Bible reading and prayer are vital parts of our faith, but what happens when our prayer lives become stagnant and our quiet times grow stale? We need something more than just familiar verses and the command to pray. In Refresh Your Prayers, Uncommon Devotions to Unlock Power and Praise, Lori Hatcher shares relevant, five-minute devotions that spotlight unusual prayer verses in the Bible.

Each devotion ends with a Power Point (a spiritual truth to empower your faith) and a Praise Prompt (a short prayer designed to magnify God and make your faith soar). The Live It Out section challenges you to apply what you’ve learned right now for immediate change.

If you’re tired of your all-too-quiet quiet time, Refresh Your Prayers is the answer.

The UNcommon Book on Prayer – Unusual Devotions to Unlock Power and Praise

Available now at Amazon.com.

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