Thanks goes to Dr. Keith Roberts, minister for the Calhoun (La.) Church of Christ, and responsible for the CrossView School of Prayer.  A few years ago, Keith developed a pamphlet designed to encourage the reading of 40 Great Prayers of the Bible.  That list became the 40 prayers studied and taught in Bill Denton's Sunday morning Bible class.  There are other great prayers, but these are among the best, the most challenging, and they will help you change the way you pray.

Rather than give an outline study of each of the prayers on this list, we have provided the handout sheets for class.  Teachers can still use these handouts for some background information, and some ideas about what questions or points to address, but they will still need to do their own preparation.  The handouts will help your class take notes, and follow up with personal study.

Here are a couple of important points we found to be vitally important to this study:

• Be sure to study the background of each prayer.  Almost all of them have a "lead-in" of circumstances, events, problems, trials or stresses that will help open up the purpose, meaning and lessons learned from each prayer.  One example is the prayer of Jesus in John 17.  Be sure to start reading in John 13 and read all four chapters before trying to understand Jesus' prayer.