How Your Phone Can Help Your Prayer Habits
Rather than a distraction, what if your phone could actually help you pray more?
Smartphones are a big part of most people’s lives these days. For most of us they contain not just our phone but our work emails, our shopping lists, our contacts, our friends updates, our books, our music, our camera, our games, our kids’ photos and our Bible among many other things.
So smartphones can bring a lot of useful connections and conveniences but—as we all know—they can also bring a lot of distractions. This can be an obstacle for our prayer life as Christians.
But what if you could use your phone to remind you to pray every day, learn how to pray more biblically, remember to pray for family and friends, and provide you with prayer needs from organizations you care about, like ANiC?
What if there are ways that our smartphones may actually be able to help equip and increase our devotional times? Perhaps there is.
One of those ways may be through an app called PrayerMate. Available for iOS, Android and Amazon devices, it’s designed to help you remember to pray and to focus your prayer time.
This app lets you set notifications on your phone reminding you to pray at any time you want throughout the day. A simple message will appear on your screen asking “Time to pray?”.
Then when you begin to pray the app displays each subject you’ve added to your prayer list like an index card. You simply swipe the screen to move on to the next one. You can include as many subjects or as few as you want in your daily routine.
Here are some of the subjects you can add:
Custom Prayers - You can write or copy and paste your own prayers. You can have a few it will cycle through each day or one that you pray every day.
Prayer Feeds - You can subscribe to various “prayer feeds” where organizations can provide daily lists of prayer requests. ANiC, Gafcon and AMiE now have prayer feeds available. The ANiC prayer feed provides our daily prayer calendar.
Biblical and liturgical prayers - There are lots of different lists of biblical and liturgical prayers you can add to your daily prayer routine. Just go to the Add Subject section of the app to browse or search through all the available subjects and lists.
Devotionals - There are a growing number of prayer devotionals available from names like John Stott, J.C. Ryle, and Charles Spurgeon.
Family & Friends - The app invites you to add names of people you’d like to regularly pray for (you can add them through your contacts list) and people in your life you want to see come to faith in Jesus. Then each day it will remind you of one or two of those names during your prayer time.
To pray you simply open the app and begin swiping. The app is really simple and can provide you with new, helpful prayer focuses every day.
If you struggle to remember to pray every day and struggle to focus when you do, this little app might make a real impact in your life. Just as the Lord can use the means of scrolls, books, radios and television he can use the means of smartphones to sanctify us and bring glory to his name. Hallelujah!
You can download the PrayerMate App for Apple, Android and Amazon devices and subscribe to the ANiC feed below:
Interested in creating a prayer feed for your church or small group. Learn more here