It’s easy to treat prayer like the spare tire—important, but stored away until life breaks down. Yet Paul presses us to put prayer at the front of our day and the front of our priorities, shaping how we think about people, authority, and even our own anxieties.

First Things First: The Order That Steadies the Soul

Paul doesn’t merely recommend prayer; he urges it as the first move of a faithful life: “I urge that petitions, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for everyone” (1 Timothy 2:1). That “first” exposes how quickly we run to analysis, outrage, or self-reliance before we run to God. Prayer isn’t avoidance—it’s alignment. When we pray first, we’re admitting that God is actually God and we are not.

And notice the variety: petitions when we need help, intercessions when others need help, and thanksgiving because grace is already at work. We’re invited to “approach the throne of grace with confidence” (Hebrews 4:16), not because we have everything together, but because Christ opened the way. Prayer first isn’t a guilt trip; it’s an open door.

Everyone Means Everyone: Widening the Circle of Your Care

“Everyone” stretches us. It includes people we understand and people who puzzle us, people who agree with us and people who don’t, people who’ve blessed us and people who’ve burned us. Jesus makes it plain: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). When you pray for someone, it becomes harder to treat them like a caricature; God starts shaping your heart while you’re asking Him to work in theirs.

This also reaches into public life. Scripture says, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities” (Romans 13:1), and part of that submission is refusing to let cynicism replace intercession. Even in hard seasons, God’s people are told, “Pray to the LORD on its behalf” (Jeremiah 29:7). Praying for leaders doesn’t mean excusing sin; it means seeking God’s restraining mercy, His wisdom, and His righteous purposes in a world that desperately needs Him.

Thanksgiving: The Engine of Bold, Peaceful Prayer

Thanksgiving isn’t a polite closing line—it’s spiritual warfare against fear and bitterness. “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6). Gratitude doesn’t deny the weight of the need; it declares the greater weight of God’s faithfulness. It’s how prayer stays warm, humble, and hopeful instead of becoming a complaint session.

And thanksgiving changes the room before it changes the circumstances. God promises that as we pray this way, “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7). Peace becomes a guardrail, keeping you steady while you wait. So today, “Enter His gates with thanksgiving” (Psalm 100:4)—and watch how gratitude turns prayer from duty into delight.

Father, thank You for welcoming me to Your throne of grace; teach me to pray first, to intercede for everyone, and to keep thanksgiving on my lips—help me do it today. Amen.

Since God is infinite, whatever He is must be infinite also; that is, it must be without any actual or conceivable limits. The moment we allow ourselves to think of God as having limits, the one of whom we are thinking is not God but someone or something less than and different from Him. To think rightly of God we must conceive of Him as being altogether boundless in His goodness, mercy, love, grace and in whatever else we may properly attribute to the Deity. It is not enough that we acknowledge God's infinite resources; we must believe also that He is infinitely generous to bestow them. The first is not too great a strain on our faith. Even the deist will admit that the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth, must be rich beyond the power of man to conceive. But to believe that God is a giver as well as a possessor takes an advanced faith and presupposes that there has been a divine revelation to that effect which gives validity to our expectations. Which indeed there has been. We call this revelation the Bible. Believing all this, why are we Christians so poverty stricken? I think it is because we have not learned that God's gifts are meted out according to the taker, not according to the giver. Though almighty and all-wise, God yet cannot pour a great gift into a small receptacle.

He, taking her by the hand, called, saying, Maiden, arise. And her spirit returned, and she rose up immediately. - Luke 8:54-55

"Maiden, arise!" All the circumstances of the miracle are marked by the most lovely consideration, on Christ’s part, of the timidity of the little girl of twelve years of age. It is because of that that He seeks to raise her in privacy, whereas the son of the widow of Nain, and Lazarus, were raised amidst a crowd. It is because of that that He selects as His companions in the room only the three chief apostles as witnesses, and the father and mother of the child. It is because of that He puts forth His hand and grasps hers, in order that the child’s eyes when they open should see only the loving faces of parents, and the not less loving face of the Master; and that her hand, when it began to move again, should clasp, first. His own tender hand. It is for the same reason that the remarkable appendix to the miracle is given - "He commanded that they should give her food." Surely that is an inimitable note of truth. No legend-manufacturer would have dared to drop down to such a homely word as that, after such a word as " Maiden, arise!" An economy of miraculous power is shown here, such as was shown when, after Lazarus came forth, other hands had to untie the grave-clothes which tripped him as he stumbled along. Christ will do by miracle what is needful and not one hair’s breadth more. In His calm majesty He bethinks Himself of the hungry child, and leaves to others the task of giving her food. That homely touch is, to me, indicative of the simple veracity of the historian.

But the life-giving word itself - what can we say about it? Only this one thing: here Jesus Christ exercises a manifest Divine prerogative. It was no more the syllables that He spoke than it was the touch of His hand that raised that child. What was it? The forth-putting of His will, which went away straight into the darkness; and if the disembodied spirit was in a locality, went straight there, and, somehow or other, laid hold of the spirit, and, somehow or other, reinstated it in its home. Christ’s will, like the king’s writ, runs through all the universe. "He spake, and it was done " - whose prerogative is that? God’s; and God manifest in the flesh exercised it. The words of the Incarnate Word have power over physical things.

Here, too, is the prelude and first-fruits of our resurrection. Not that there are not wide differences between the raising of this child and that future resurrection to which Christian hope looks forward, but that in this one little incident - little compared with the majestic scale of the latter - there come out these two things: the demonstration that conscious life runs on, irrespective of the accident of its being united with or separated from a bodily organization; and the other, that Jesus Christ has power over men’s spirits, and can fit them at His will to bodies appropriate to their condition. Time is no element in the case. What befalls the particles of the human frame is no element in the case. " Thou sowest not the body that shall be." But if that Lord had the power, which He showed in that one chamber, with that one child, then, as a little window may show us great matters, so we see through this single incident the time when " they that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth."