Before we start to look at the unparalleled, specific benefits of praying with and from your heart, I want you to imagine the following scenario.

If you were to come home and find a sumptuous, surprise birthday meal awaiting you, you’d probably reach for the phone and let all your friends know!

‘Guess what?’, you’d announce excitedly, ‘I just came home to find the most amazing birthday meal on my table!’

And your excitement would certainly be 100% justified.

But unless you ate the meal, unless you allowed it to become part of you, the gift’s nourishing physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual benefits would be completely lost on you.

It’s exactly the same when you are born again and baptized.

Your baptism is the ticket admitting you into God’s gifts.

But it’s ONLY the ticket.

Or suppose you were given an airplane ticket to the city of Paris.

If you were to tell your friends that you experienced Paris simply because you were given a ticket for the journey to Paris, they’d wonder if you were living in an alternate universe!

It’s only when you actually put to use the ticket of baptism and rebirth that your ticket becomes meaningful and fruitful, serving the purpose for which God intended it.

As Paul the Apostle says, “We are co-workers in the Lord’s service …’ (1Corinthians 3:9, my emphasis).

By themselves, being born again and/or baptism are not the experience of God’s Kingdom.

They are only your springboard into the lifelong experience of conversion to His kingdom.

Your Journey with God is the Journey

Through Each One of Your Life-Experiences

Your journey with God is, in fact, the journey through each one of your life-experiences.

After all, it is experiences that make up your whole life.

And if you want to journey hand-in-hand with the Lord, you must invite Him into all your life experiences —both joyful and traumatic.

If you leave God out of your life experiences, they will remain vaporous, passing life-episodes.

They will lack meaning.

It would be like admiring your birthday meal but declining to actually eat it!

But when you invite the Lord into your life experiences, they actually become your personal salvation story.

Why?

Because God saves you through, and in, each and every one of your life experiences.

That is how your own personal salvation story progresses, just as the personal salvation history of Job and Jonah and the Apostles Peter and Andrew —to name just a very few —progressed.

If the Old Testament writers and the gospel and epistle writers had not invited the Lord into their various life experiences, we would have no scriptures.

Keeping God out of your life experiences would make the Lord sad.

And it would cheat you of the joy and blessings and benefits of ongoing salvation.

It would be like mistaking the ticket to baptism and rebirth for the actual journey it permits you to embark upon, to benefit from, and to enjoy!

And it would make your journey with the Lord dull, mediocre and ultimately fruitless.

When you invite God to share your experiences, your life here on earth radiates with vibrancy.

 It becomes the fruitful life Jesus promised you (John 10:10).

Don’t you invite your close friends to share in your joy at your wedding and in your children’s milestone events?

And don’t you invite your close friends to share in your grief at the visitation and funeral of a close family member?

The Lord is no different!

He longs for you to invite Him into your life experiences, both joyful AND traumatic, and to let Him share in them.

Continuing Transformation into God’s Image

is the Goal of Your Journey with Him

If ever there was a definitive and dramatic born-again experience, it was Paul the Apostle’s.

Yet even Paul would learn that, for him, this was only the beginning of his transformation.

Paul soon came to understand that throughout his life, God continued to ask of him even

• greater faith
• greater love
• greater strength

in the face of enormous suffering.

Continuing transformation into God’s image is the ultimate goal of your journey with Him (Ephesians 4:22 - 24 NIV; 2 Corinthians 3:18; Colossians 3:10). 

This is what God longs for.

Transformation is definitely not a one-off affair.

It’s ongoing!

You can never consider yourself to have ‘arrived’ spiritually until you take your last breath.

 

The Most Effective Opportunity for Your

Ongoing Transformation into God’s Image

is Prayer of the Heart

Prayer of the heart is the spiritual midwife who keeps bringing to birth the image and likeness of God within you.

It is, in my experience of 26 years of guiding Christian women, the most effective opportunity for your ongoing transformation into God’s image.

Why?

Because it enables you to actually ENCOUNTER/MEET PERSONALLY the Living Lord —and to do so whenever you want or need to.

In this repeated encounter, you give the green light to the Lord to lovingly, patiently, gently and gradually dismantle your old woman and replace it with your ‘new’ woman’ (Ephesians 4:22 - 24 NIV). 

Only when this meeting and encounter takes place on a regular basis for a few minutes each day does your ongoing transformation have its greatest chance of really happening. 

Prayer of the Heart is NOT the Only Way to Pray;

But it’s a Uniquely Fruitful Way

Praying with and from your heart is not the only way to pray.

In fact, there are as many ways of praying as there are people.

Why?

Because all prayer is a consent to God’s presence.

And each one of us expresses her consent differently.

In fact, each one of us uses several different expressions in the course of a single day.

This is as it should be.

The Lord wants you and I to be free at all times to be who we are before God.

But the encounter between you and the Lord that happens when you pray with and from your heart renders this particular form of prayer unique and fruitful.

It ALWAYS gets results.

What Distinguishes Prayer of the Heart

From All Other Prayer Traditions

The distinguishing feature of prayer of the heart is the fact that your single intention is to be more fully present to the Lord.

You see, the Lord is always fully present to you and me.

But you and I are definitely not always fully present to Him!

Your thoughts, words and emotions all carry a great deal of baggage, even though for much of the time you and I are not even conscious of this.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. You are not aware that you have this baggage.

Thoughts and words come from your thinking, analytical mind.

And this mind carries with it a great deal of mental clutter.

Your feelings also carry a great deal of clutter.

This is why when you pray with your heart, you learn to let go of feelings, too.

The baggage contained in your thoughts, words, and emotions makes it harder for the Lord to get through to you.

When you pray with and form your heart, you learn to let go of the usual words, thoughts, and feelings that are part and parcel of other forms of prayer.

The Personal Transformation You Can Expect

You emerge....

• freer than you ever thought possible
• fully accepting of yourself, warts and all
• with the ability to love others without conditions i. e. far more accepting of others (you don’t have to change them first!)
• far healthier emotionally, mentally, and physically
• more peace-filled
• more joy-filled
• with a crystal-clear sense of your personal identity
• with a deep sense of self-worth
• wiser than you ever thought possible
• knowing with greater clarity where you want to go, and why
• inspired to lead others to enjoy the same benefits
• inspired to have others discover what you have —not primarily by words or 'preaching' but by example and love
• with a far greater clarity on your priorities 
• with a genuine understanding of evil so that you can identify its presence before it harms you or your loved ones

• with all your other forms of prayer enriched, deepened, made more real, made more personally satisfying
• with a fresh and vibrant understanding of the scriptures
• with the ability and readiness to abandon the defensive armor that you developed way back in your early childhood years to protect you from the big, often unforgiving world, and that you thought (mistakenly) you needed to keep protecting you as an adult but that has actually gotten in the way of your adult relationship with God.
• It begins to dawn on you that He wants to find you even more than you want to find Him!

And here’s an exciting fact:

As time passes, your family and friends notice these changes for the better in you too!

In fact, they often notice them even before you do!

The Specific Benefits You Reap

• When you learn to let go of words, thoughts and feelings, you begin to free up a space inside your heart where the Lord can easily enter.
• You are now able to more easily experience the Lord, His love and His rest —directly, firsthand, one-on-one, without the usual filters of words and thoughts and feelings
• When you open your heart to the Lord’s Presence, you enable Him to penetrate every aspect of your humanity —which He does gently, and with great love and sensitivity
• It is the firsthand, direct experience of His love that deepens your connection to the Lord
• It is the firsthand, direct experience of God’s love that changes the way you see Him, yourself, and all the other people whose lives you touch, including your spouse and children —namely through the eyes of genuine LOVE
• When you know by firsthand experience that someone loves you, you begin to trust that person.
• When you begin to trust that person, you become
• When you become friends, you want to talk to that person and you want to have that person talk to you.
• You develop the confidence to start a genuine, 2-way conversation with that person.
• This is exactly what happens between you and God.
• As you progress exponentially in love and trust and depth and meaning in your relationship with God, you move well beyond mere Christian doctrine and theology
• You arrive at the place where you meet and see with new eyes the Person at the very centre of that doctrine, Jesus himself
• Then, Jesus himself takes you to meet the Father and then the Holy Spirit in the same fresh way and with the same new

You...

• are able to truly allow the Lord to find you right where you are, at this very moment in your life, just as you are, sins and all

 

• can maintain your connection to Him,regardless of how your external situations might change

 

• sleep better at night

 

• have the Lord himself as your personal Teacher

 

• will never again have to spin your spiritual wheels

 

• will never again have to experience the desolation and confusion you might be experiencing now

 

• have at your fingertips a solid, time-tested means of dealing with future crises, loss, trauma, tough experiences and testy personal relationships

 

• can live at peace and with joy even in ‘impossible’ situations

 

• are able to move well beyond the specific Christian doctrine you hold, and your particular Christian tradition, to genuinely embrace people from all Christian denominations, as well as people of non-Christian faiths

 

• are therefore able to make reality, rather than simply cheap words, Christ’s heartfelt prayer that all Christians would unite as one (John 17:21)

 

The ability to experience God and experience His love whenever you need to is a gift that has no equal in your Christian journey.

This repeated experience, whenever you want or need it, validates you on an ongoing basis.

Here’s what some of the women I’ve guided over 26 years have to say about the lasting benefits of this way of being present to God.

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