How to Make a Prayer Journal

Thank you for joining me for Triathlon Tuesday. Today, I want to show you how to set up a simple prayer journal. Last week I encouraged you to begin praying for at least 5 minutes everyday. This week I hope you will increase that time until you are praying for at least 30 minutes a day. Not that the length of time is important, but you should be able to sustain a 30 minute prayer session. In order to pray for this length of time, you must know what to pray for. As you can see from my picture above, my prayer journal is very simplistic. If you want a fancier design, then look on Pinterest. I have found many beautiful hand-made prayer journals. I am not concerned with the outside of my prayer journal as much as the inside. I have tried several types of prayer journals over the years such as a two column system with dates prayed on one side and date answered in the other or just journaling my prayer requests in a notebook. I find these methods to be too time consuming. If I am going to pray for 30 minutes, then I don’t want to record all my requests. I also don’t want to search through pages and pages of journal entries to find the day I first began praying for something. I desire to be a prayer warrior and not a prayer book keeper. The design I have come up with is much simpler. It requires an accordion coupon file or a notecard box, with 6 dividers. You can see a picture of the inside of mine below:

As you can see, I have a section for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Everyday. I usually do not have much of a quiet time on weekends. If I pray on Sunday, then I pray according to the leading of the Holy Spirit, but we will talk more about that later. We have to learn to walk in the Spirit before we can be led by the Spirit to pray.

I have different notecards in each section of the file. For example, everyday I pray for my husband, myself and my children as well as any lost family members or friends. I also pray for boldness and the filling of the Holy Spirit. Each of my family members has their own card with prayer requests for each. I then have a card with lost family and friends listed on the card. You may wish to include the Bible verse you are memorizing for the week as well as boldness verses. These cards would be filed under the “Everyday” tab. On Mondays I would use my “Everyday” cards in addition to the cards filed under “Monday”. In the “Monday” file I have cards for my extended family members such as my parents and siblings. Each family would have their own card. On Tuesdays I have cards for Aunts, Uncles and cousins with one card per family. Rather than ramble on about my daily prayer cards, I have made a list for you to print. Of course you would come up with your own system, but I wanted to show you how I do mine. Sometimes it is easier to start with someone else’s system until you can work out and tweak your own. Here is the downloadable Prayer Journal Cards. You will make a card for each line on this sheet. If one of your family or friends has an emergency, then you can add their card to the everyday file until the crisis is over. This system is very manageable. It is simpler than flipping through a notebook. You can even add dates to your cards, if you want to keep track of when you began praying for a particular prayer requests. The possibilities are endless. However don’t become so regimented in prayer that you have to pray according to your cards everyday. Sometimes I like to listen to the Lord and pray as He prompts me to pray. In fact, I used this prayer journal in the beginning as I was learning to pray and now I pray more under the leadership of the Holy Spirit. On certain days I feel so compelled to pray for Revival and Spiritual Awakening that it is all I can pray for. Being able to pray in this way takes time to learn, so start with baby steps and use the prayer journal until you are able to go to the next level in your prayer life. God will answer prayers either way. Do keep in mind that if your prayers are not confessed up-to-date, then neither method is effective. Here is a copy of the Sin List from A-Z, which should be included in your Prayer Journal. Encourage your children and teens to make their own journals.

My sister actually told me about this system and I have used it for years. I do keep a separate journal where I record answers to prayer. If the Lord does something amazing in my life, sets me in a new direction or answers one of my prayer requests, then I record it in my journal. This is much easier than trying to keep track of prayer requests. I call this journal my Praise Journal because it is a praise to the Lord for answered prayer. Many prayers take years for the Lord to answer so I choose not to keep track of when I first started to pray for something.

Please leave a comment below if you have a Prayer Journal system that works for you.