Things You'll Need:
- nothing - just pray
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Step 1
ACTS stands for Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. I will explain each of these and what it means for prayer.
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Step 2
A - Adoration:
This is where you begin your prayer by praising God for who He is and for the things He has done in your life. All praise is part of your adoration. -
Step 3
C - Contrition:
This is the part of the prayer where you acknowledge your sins. It doesn't just have to be sins of today or even just the sins of which you are aware. Confess your sins and He will forgive you. -
Step 4
T - Thanksgiving:
This is pretty much what it says. Give God the thanks and the glory for the good and bad in your life. -
Step 5
S - Supplication:
This is the part most people think of when they pray. Supplication is where you ask God for things like patience, intervention on someone's behalf, strength for a difficult task, etc. Any and everything that you need/want God's help for falls under supplication. -
Step 6
Make sure you go through the other steps before you get to supplication. The reason this outline is so good is because it forces us to do something we are not used to doing: that is taking time to thank and praise God and admit when we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. It's too easy to just pray for what we want and treat prayer as God's vending machine. Using the ACTS way to pray helps keep our minds on prayer and communication with God and remember the awesomeness of God.
Comments
Teachforever said
on 10/22/2009 Excellent writing.5*
LouisJeffries said
on 12/31/2008 Interesting that we wrote similar article the same day. God must be telling us something. 5*