If you are part of a Christian fellowship group, you probably receive many prayer requests. We all have many people to pray for--family, friends, neighbors, etc.. We all have many things to ask God for. And He wants us to come to Him with all our petitions, both large and small.
But when we pray for others, the most important thing to pray for is the spiritual health of the person. God's Word says: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?" (Matthew 16:26) What good does it do if a man is healed of cancer but goes to hell when he dies. Or if he gets a job, but goes on living a life apart from God.
In the Gospel of Matthew, some people brought a paralyzed man to Jesus. Jesus first said to him, "Have courage, son, your sins are forgiven." Then, after the scribes protested that Jesus dared to forgive sins, Jesus told the paralyzed man, "Stand up! Roll up your mat and go home." And the man stood up, totally healed. In this Jesus was showing that the spiritual state of a person is more important than the physical state--the health of the soul is more important than the health of the body.
So when we pray for someone, or ask others to pray, let's pray about the spiritual state of the person first, then for their physical or temporal needs.
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