C.A.S.T. prayer method

If you've been around church world for a while you might be familiar with the A.C.T.S. method for prayer. I've been in a couple of prayer groups that used it. It's a handy tool for keeping group prayer on point. It incorporates worship, confession and thanksgiving instead of just the usual "bless or help so and so..." God wants us to bring our requests to him, of course, but this ACTS tool reminds us of who God is, and who we really are. It can really enrich a group prayer time. You basically have everyone who wants to pray hold to this outline:

• A - adoration: open your prayer time by giving everyone opportunity to speak a prayer of adoration and worship to God. Ideally you've got 6 - 10 people in your group and this takes 5 - 10 minutes.
• C - confession: in a group we don't need to air all of our dirty laundry so this is best done by having the group leader say "We'll now take 2 or 3 minutes of silent prayer to privately confess our personal sins to the Lord." When the time is up the leader proceeds to the next step.
• T - thanksgiving: Everyone's prayers are full of thankfulness and praise for various gifts and workings of God during the past and current circumstances, and/or appreciation for God's character and truth.
• S - supplication: praying our requests (the bless or help so and so's) to God and asking for His will to be done. 

While I think it's good for group prayer, I've never been comfortable with it on my own. Psalms 66:18 says, "If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened." In other words, God chooses to not listen to the prayers of Christians who harbor sin rather than confess it! I realized I needed to put CONFESSION at the top of my prayer time.

I played around with the ACTS acronym and rearranged the letters putting Confession first and ended up with: CATS. LOL, that  wasn't going to work! Just not biblical, not reverent, and not a word that would help me focus on God Almighty! A cat would probably like it though.

But what about this one? C.A.S.T.

Ah... that's good!

• C - Confession
• A - Adoration - something I can express so much better with a clean heart!
• S - Supplication - the real reason I pray anyway - because I need a lot of God's help, intervention and miracles in my life!
• T - Thanksgiving - what a wonderful way to close my prayer time - by thanking God for what he's already done, plus for what he will do in the needs  and situations I just "cast" before him.

CAST all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. I Peter 5:7

CAST your cares on the Lord

and he will sustain you;

he will never let the righteous fall.

Psalm 55:22

Let's hurry and go CAST! God cares, he will sustain, and he will never let the righteous fall!