11 Sermon Illustrations on Prayer

Are you preaching on prayer? Check out these great illustration ideas that bring biblical truths to life through word pictures, stories, and everyday examples.

• Praying For Our Foes
  The most effective teams are those that learn to work together always, whether in seasons of great success or failure. We don’t always agree with our teammates, but that doesn’t mean we can’t come together for the team and accomplish our goal. Teams are made up of people, and every person has their own story.… Read more: Praying For Our Foes
• Shredding Confessions
  Sometimes confession is hard to say aloud. Writing things out with pencil and paper seems a little less scary. Although confessing with our mouths one to another is the ideal form of confessing, a written confession is a good place to start. Make paper and pencils available to the students and invite them to write… Read more: Shredding Confessions
• Trusting God’s Presence
  Scotty Smith reflects on the beauty of trusting God’s presence and our transformation in a prayer. He speaks of how we need to learn to rest in the way God transforms us. Here is a wonderful section: “There is no safer place, in life or in death, than to be in Christ. This doesn’t mean… Read more: Trusting God’s Presence
• Tactical Pause
  Pausing to lift our concerns to God is a valuable habit to form when approaching a conflict. In Resolving Everyday Conflict, Ken Sande and Kevin Johnson write, “One of the most valuable things you can do in conflict is to simply stop—just as you are about to say something to put conflict over the edge,… Read more: Tactical Pause
• Embracing Silence
  Jean-Nicholas Grou was a Jesuit priest in Paris at the time of the French Revolution in 1789. He was forced to escape to England, where he remained for the rest of his life. Despite the tumultuousness of his time, he insisted that practices of silent prayer were indispensable to spiritual growth. “In these moments of… Read more: Embracing Silence
• Trust God In Prayer
  We must not give up or stop praying. There is a pastor who, rightly or wrongly, would pray regularly that attendance on Sunday would break the one-hundred mark. One morning he got up and saw it was snowing. Immediately his spirits sank, as he just knew this would hurt attendance. But suddenly, he felt the Spirit bringing… Read more: Trust God In Prayer
• Facing Yourself
  Sometimes we think of our negative emotions as separate entities from ourselves. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, the doctor creates a potion that will separate his good side from his dark side, thus transforming himself into man and beast. However, the beast begins to take over,… Read more: Facing Yourself
• Can You Hear Me Now?
  Do you remember the Verizon guy who switched to Sprint , who was always asking the person on the other end of the phone, “Can you hear me now?”, our motives can create a bad connection with God and others.  Until we ‘switch carriers’—trading in our flesh for the Spirit—and repent of the way we… Read more: Can You Hear Me Now?
• More Than A Grocery List
  Prayer is inviting God into our circumstances, into our hopes, into our fears, into our dreams, and into our pain. Prayer is not working our way through a grocery list of requests that we desire God to perform or answer the way we expect him to. Prayer allows us to live relationally with God. Living… Read more: More Than A Grocery List
• Empowered By Prayer
  “The things in your house work because of electricity. Electricity is an invisible power that gives you visible privileges. It turns the lights on, turns the TV on, turns the toaster on, and turns the oven on; all that stuff is working in your house because you’ve got one invisible power shooting through there called… Read more: Empowered By Prayer
• True Confidence
  The way we walk projects to the world the confidence we do—or don’t—have within. This video coaches’ men on how to exhibit a more confident posture.  While self-help tips can get us only so far, in Christ, we have a true reason for confidence— confidence when coming into the presence of the one true God. Hebrews… Read more: True Confidence