Growth Progression in Prayer

Today in worship I shared with members of our church the story of one young man's progression of growth in prayer. Below is a very abbreviate description of the progression he experienced.

1. Doubt---He began with doubt. Through listening to many stories on answered prayer his curiosity began to peak and he started to recognize God answering prayers.
2. Curiosity/Exploration and Work--He then looked for tools and I offered to him an A.C.T.S. prayer as one guide to expand his prayer vocabulary. A.C.T.S. stands for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. He started practicing the ACTS prayer.
3. Hitting Walls--As he started to grow spiritually, it created internal conflict. He experienced a painful period of questioning his faith tradition.
   
4. Service--Once he reconciled the internal conflict he was experiencing, he found himself wanting to teach others to serve and prayer with his newly integrated knowledge.
5. Leadership--Overtime he actually learned to exercise leadership in prayer.
   
6. Wisdom--Through the practice of leadership he came to possess not just a depth of knowledge in prayer but the wisdom to rightly discern the need and use of prayer.
7. Full integration--He eventually came to have a body felt sense of the spiritual. He could feel when people were praying for him. Or felt unrest when spiritually a situation was out of balance.

This progression of learning is not only a normative sequence for prayer but of essentially anything else we learn. In the days to come I will unpack these pieces more clearly.