Are you praying for your neighbors?

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. ³⁵ And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶ “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” ³⁷ And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:34-40

Are you praying regularly for your neighbors? I’m now writing about your literal neighbors, the people who live in your neighborhood. The people next door or across the street. Praying for people is one of the greatest acts of love you can do. But that sounds rather passive. That is true only if you don’t understand what happens when you pray for people.

People with an extreme view of God’s sovereignty struggle with the idea that praying for people actually changes the situation. I say that as one who many would consider has an extreme view of the sovereignty of God. I also have an extreme view of what happens when people of faith pray. That is because of what Jesus says about prayer. He states that one with minimal faith can metaphorically move mountains. That is an extreme view in my mind.

I can guarantee you that your neighbors need prayer because you either have neighbors who don’t know Jesus, or if they know Jesus, they have some need for meaningful action from God in their lives. All of your neighbors need the intervention of God in their lives, and you can be the conduit through which the Holy Spirit works to enter their life just where and how it is needed.

I want to introduce to you a wonderful tool created through the ministry of Every Home for Christ. You can find them at BlessEveryHome.com. This website allows you to input your address, and it will automatically assign about 40 or your nearest neighbors to you to pray for. You can see the neighbors in list form or on a map. You can edit the list as I did. I live in a distinct community from the surrounding neighborhoods, and I wanted to focus on this set of neighbors. I had to add more addresses and delete some that were outside my targeted neighborhood. So, you can customize it to work for you.

Once you sign up with the website, you can have emails sent to you to give you a list of five or the homes you have chosen to pray for. You can set it to send emails every day or only on designated days. I get my email every day except Sunday.

They even give you a suggested Scriptural prayer in the email that you can pray for your neighbors that day if you need a little help. They gather all the information about your neighbors from public sources that allow them to give you the names of the people who live there or own the property. The map looks like this:

This article’s basis is the Great Commandment from Matthew, which, paraphrased, says to love God with all you are and love your neighbor as yourself. If you do these two things, you will fulfill all the law. It seems to me the most loving thing we can do for our neighbors is to pray for their entry into the Kingdom of God. So, I say, love your neighbors. Pray for them daily. If you would like more encouragement about prayer, check out the website for my other ministry NSDC Prayer Force.

You can check out Bless Every Home at their website blesseveryhome.com. I encourage you to do so.

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