My friend’s nine-year-old son came home crestfallen from Sunday school one day. “What’s wrong?” his mother asked.
“They wouldn’t pray for my prayer request,” said the boy. “I wanted to pray about the panda bears in China, but they said we should pray for personal things. Why couldn’t we pray about the pandas, Mom?”
I’m sure the Sunday school teacher at my friend’s church wasn’t trying to be insensitive about the dwindling population of pandas in China; but unfortunately, he or she missed an opportunity to affirm the boy’s faith and expectation, two powerful motivating factors when it comes to equipping and empowering children in prayer. Children are motivated to pray about the things
that touch their hearts—friends, family, teachers, even pets. We often smile at the innocence of their prayers, some of them quite nonreligious. But that’s the way we want them to pray—naturally.
As they learn to approach their heavenly Father with their daily concerns and needs—and see Him answer—children learn to trust Him as the one who can fight their battles and those of the people they love. They learn to look to Him to provide for them, defend them, and to intervene in the world in real and powerful ways. If we are not quick to listen to even what may seem like “out of the box” prayer concerns, we may miss hearing that child’s heart.
Children, after all, are closer than adults to the approach Jesus tells us to take in prayer: with personal expectation and from the standpoint of a father-child relationship. “Ask and it shall be given to you,” He says in Matthew 7. “Seek, and you shall find . . . if you then know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!” This is how children still look at the world.
For all their innocence, children’s prayers, though not as articulate as adults’, are worth listening to. Children, it turns out, share many of our same concerns. Hillary, a small friend of mine, was five or six when she became deeply concerned for a friend in her neighborhood. The little girl was suffering constant respiratory distress as a result of her parents’ smoking in the home. Powerless to help her friend by any physical means, Hillary began to pray that God would move the parents to quit smoking and provide relief for her friend. Sure enough, within a couple of months, without anyone saying a word to them, both parents quit smoking!
And it’s not only personal problems. Children as young as three and four years old can also be sensitive to poverty, hunger, crime, and divorce. I once attended a church service where children and youth were invited to join adults on the platform to help lead in prayer. “Would you pray for the hurting and abused children in the world?” the speaker asked, handing the microphone to a five-year-old boy. With stammering lips and a shaking voice the child began to pray. As he continued to pray for his generation I was amazed at his clarity and focus. “God make the mothers and fathers stop fighting,” he cried. “Tell them it’s hurting their kids.” Another child prayed for the salvation of young people who did not know Christ. Others prayed for revival in their schools and that our nation would return to God. The simplicity of their prayers, accompanied by humility and brokenness, brought tremendous conviction to the hearts of everyone in the room.
The immediacy of children’s prayers can continue through high school. When our daughter Nicole was a junior in high school she started a citywide prayer ministry called Sacred Edge. The first Friday night of every month young people from around the Phoenix area gathered to call out to God for the things affecting their generation—fatherlessness, drugs, loneliness.
These were some gutsy prayers, maybe even what some of us would consider a little “raw.” Yet I would rather see a young person pray prayers from the heart than the most eloquent rote prayer. Jesus spoke to this difference: “When you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition” (Matthew 6:7).
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