I hope you all do some sort of daily devotion with prayer. It's obviously a good thing and you don't need me to tell you that you should be doing it. It's one thing to know you should be doing something and another to be motivated to do it.

Like, just cause I know I should eat healthy doesn't mean I can't stop eating chocolate covered bacon for breakfast.

But in case you are motivated in doing some sort of daily devotional and prayer and you need a little structure to your prayers and don't want to just randomly pray for stuff that happens to pop into your head, this is for you.

There are four main sections that you could have during your prayers. And it's all in this little acronym:

"A.C.T.S."

I'll explain what each part is.

A - "Adoration". This is the praise part of praying. Praise is adoration of who God is. You praise someone for their traits and attributes. A really simple way of defining praise is if you can fill in the blank here, "God is ________," that's most likely praise. God is love, God is just, God is sovereign, etc. Praise would be like, "God I praise you because you are a God of love."

C - "Confession". You also should be confessing your sins during prayer. We should always realize that we suck. We're not any better than anyone around us. The only righteousness we have in God's eyes is from Christ. So confession would be like, "God, I pray that you would forgive me for throwing bacon on my mom in anger."

T - "Thanks". Duh. You know what giving thanks is right? But sometimes it's easy to get thanks confused with praise. Praise is for a trait someone has, thanks is for what someone has done.

Like you can't thank me for being super good looking, cause I didn't do anything to be super good looking, God made me that way. But you can praise me for being super good looking. You can thank me for giving you a aardvark, but you can't praise me for the aardvark.

You can however praise my generosity for giving you an aardvark. Now you are praising my generosity, not the aardvark. Thanks for giving me the aardvark, praise for the generosity. Difference. But don't get too bent out of shape if you kinda get praise confused with thanks. I'm guessing God understands what you mean.

S - "Supplication". This is more commonly known has prayer requests. And if I used "PR" instead of "S", then the acronym would spell ACTPR and that doesn't make any sense. I could say PRACT, but that's not a word either. So anyways ‘supplication' is asking God for stuff. Supplication would be like, "God, please heal my headache, help me stop throwing cheese at my enemies, I pray for wisdom," and whatever.

So at night or morning, or whenever you do your devotions, this little acronym pretty much covers the bases to have a complete prayer.

Now we just need to be motivated to actually do devotions. Would it help if I gave you an aardvark?

(Verses Used: Psalm 100:4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.  I John 1:9-10 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.  Psalm 119:170 May my supplication come before you; deliver me according to your promise.)