How To Start Keeping A Prophetic Prayer Journal

Start keeping a prophetic prayer journal: it can accelerate growth in your prophetic gift. Find out how to start keeping a prophetic prayer journal right here!

One of the best keys to growth in your prophetic gift is to start keeping a prayer journal. But one better than a prayer journal is a prophetic prayer journal.

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Try any of the forms on this page!

Previously, we looked at why you need a prophetic prayer journal. To summarise, a prophetic prayer journal:

1. reminds you of God’s goodness.
2. enables a heavenly perspective.
3. validates your direction.
4. encourages perseverance.
5. is a key to growth.

If you’ll pardon the expression, a prophetic prayer journal is a prayer journal on steroids. But how do you start keeping a prophetic prayer journal?

Note: I know it can be a bit of a mouthful, so I’ll use “prophetic prayer journal” and “prayer journal” interchangeably throughout this post.
But what I want to get across to you is how to use your journal specifically to improve your prophetic gift and:

• draw you closer to God.
• help you hear his voice more clearly.
• give you confidence in sharing words with others (when prompted by Holy Spirit).

In this post, I’ll go through how you can start keeping your prophetic prayer journal.

We’ll look at how to start writing your very first day in your prayer journal.

I’ll show you a sample prayer journal entry, and how to organise journal sections.

Keep reading right to the end of this post, and there’s a reward in it for you too…

Prophetic Prayer Journal Helps Answer Questions

Sometimes God speaks to us directly and all we have to do is obey. More commonly, however, the Lord speaks to us over a period of time, which may take months or years.

I became a writer about five years ago. It didn’t start overnight and I don’t remember getting a direct revelation from God that I should do it.

Instead, I began to hunger for more creativity in my life. I thought that writing might be a good outlet and more importantly, I had a growing desire to help and teach other people. I started off with a small blog on the free Blogger platform, and I prayed as I wrote.

As I made progress with my blog, I wrote in my prayer journal, to see how the Lord might be leading me in this.

Questions, Questions

One of my first questions was whether the Lord was calling me into writing merely as a creative release, or if there was a longer term, perhaps career-related goal.

Over time, I reviewed my prophetic prayer journal and began to realise that God had placed this gift of writing within me for a purpose.

I had started to write about ergonomics and I wanted to see people healed so that they could work comfortably and be set free physically.

Later on, I realised that there was a deep yearning within me: to be close to God himself, to worship him and minister to him directly – in the Holy Place, as it were.

As my relationship with him grew, so did my prophetic gifting. It had always been there, but there was an increase and a desire for even more.

Finally, I came to the conclusion that my life calling is to reach out to other people and teach them how to get closer to God, hear his voice and prophesy to others. And that’s what I believe the Lord is now moving me into.

The important thing to understand here is that:

1. This process took the last five years (probably more, if I think about it carefully)
2. Many prophetic words and pictures given to me 4 or 5 years ago came true much later
3. Some of those words are yet to be fulfilled
4. If I hadn’t written them down in my prophetic prayer journal, I would have forgotten a lot of those words and my personal growth would have suffered

The promise of God is always greater than our current reality.

The promise is always greater than our current reality: it is only as we take intentional steps to grow into maturity, that we are able to take hold of what God calls us to. For me, keeping a prophetic prayer journal is one of those intentional steps.

How To Start Keeping A Prophetic Prayer Journal

There is an ongoing journey and there is always more to learn, but your prophetic prayer journal can help you grow in the unique ways God is calling you to. Let’s see how you can get started today.

Start Keeping A Prophetic Prayer Journal: The Right Tools

I’m going to be really practical here, so let’s begin by talking about tools.

I’ll give you some examples in a moment, but the most important point here is this:

Tools themselves don’t matter. Prayer journaling does, in whatever way makes sense to YOU.

In other words, use whatever tools you’re most comfortable with, that will help you keep journaling.

Here are some tools you could use:

• Pen and paper
• Filofax
• Electronic notebook
• Notes app on your smartphone
• Notes app that syncs between phone, tablet and desktop PC*

*I’m a fan of Evernote (referral/affiliate link: Evernote is free to use, but if you download and install a copy through this link, you’ll get 1 month premium subscription free – and I get points towards premium too).

The best way forward when you are getting started is to pick one of the tools above and then stick with it.
Chopping and changing between them will just confuse the issue and then you’ll end up not writing anything.

If you want to buy a new diary or notebook for your prayer journal, that’s fine, but don’t wait until you get it:
Write your first few entries on paper, then transfer them across to your new diary when it arrives.

The best way to get going is just to begin writing. You can always start off messy and tidy up later.

And we’re going to start immediately. Yes, you heard me!

You see, what happens if you don’t start straight away?

You’ll forget. You’ll get swamped by other pressures and priorities, that’s what.
So let’s nip that in the bud right now!

Start Keeping A Prophetic Prayer Journal: Your First Journal Entry

Do this simple exercise and then come back (I promise it’ll take you less than 2 minutes):

1. Go grab paper and pen, or open a new Notepad window on your computer
2. Pray quickly (even if it’s just in your head)
3. Write or type whatever comes into your mind

Tips:

• It doesn’t matter how long or short it is: it could be a couple of sentences, it could be just one or two words
• The exact subject doesn’t matter. It could be about: something you think God has said, a person you prayed for, or the thing you’re most worried about.
• It also doesn’t matter if it’s tidy or not.

What matters is that you’ve just written your very first prayer journal entry:
Well done!

Start Keeping A Prophetic Prayer Journal: Keep It Separate

One recommendation I would make: keep your prophetic prayer journal separate to other diaries or notebooks.

By this I mean, either have a complete diary dedicated to your prayer journal or put your journal entries into their own section.

You want to be able to get to your journal at any moment when inspiration strikes. You don’t want any confusion with your day to day appointments, shopping lists, etc.

• Also, you don’t want to throw away your prayer journal entries by accident!

Start Keeping A Prophetic Prayer Journal: Seek God Every Day

In order to grow your prophetic gift, make a point of seeking God every day.

Do whatever you can to begin to build momentum, each day and each week.

You don’t have to make journal entries every day, but you do need to be intentional about growing your gifts.

And the best way of doing that is to spend more time getting close to God. For help on finding time to do that, see this article.

Aim to get something fresh from the Lord for your journal each week, whatever it is.

It’s fine to write something simple on how you felt about your relationship with God that day.

Even if God gives you just an impression of a thought or emotion, it’s still a step forward in your understanding of how to hear him.

Start Keeping A Prophetic Prayer Journal: Sections

How should you organise your prayer journal sections?

To my mind, there are two main ways of organising your prayer journal: by type of entry or chronologically, by date.

Prayer Journal Sections Based On Entry Type

If you’re a very ordered/organised person, you may want to split up your journal entries into sections based on the following “folders”:

• Bible verses
• Pictures and dreams
• Thoughts and impressions
• Prophetic words from others
• Interpretations

These will vary greatly according to how God speaks to you.
For example, some people are very visual in their thinking, so they tend to receive lots of pictures and dreams, or impressions of colour and texture. Others love books and reading, so they tend to hear the Lord through the scriptures.

Prayer Journal Sections Based On Date

If you’re the less organised type or more spontaneous, then you may prefer a straight chronological journal, with no special sections at all.

This way, you can see a history of what the Lord has said. The potential downside is you can lose track of where you are when you come to review it. However, you can get around that by creating a new section for each month and year. A physical diary or Filofax makes this easier as you’ll most likely have a new one for each new year.

Even if you decide to go with prayer journal sections based on Entry Type, I would recommend you still use dates within each section. This will help maintain that all-important history, so you can review where you are more effectively.

Using Evernote To Organise Your Prayer Journal Sections

If like me, you’re into electronic notebooks on your smartphone/tablet, then there’s a third way to organise your prayer journal sections: Evernote (affiliate link).

You can, of course, use any note taking application. However, I like Evernote because I’ve used it for years, but also because I can create a hybrid approach which gives me the best of both worlds.

I get the full chronological history I mentioned earlier, but I can also “tag” journal entries to remind myself of key moments (amongst other things). And I can retrieve them all at a moment’s notice, using Evernote’s built-in search functions.

I was going to include a detailed rundown of how I set up my prophetic prayer journal in Evernote, but it seems that I have run out of space in this post!

I’ll look to do something on this another day, but if you’re keen to learn more about it, then let me know in the comments area below. Update: you can find out more right here.

Start Keeping A Prophetic Prayer Journal: Sample Entry Template

Beyond setting up your prayer journal sections, there’s a further level of organisation you can use. And that’s to use a prayer journal template for the individual entries.

The great thing about having a prayer journal template is that it will save you loads of time writing your journal entries. Better still, because it puts the entries into a clear, repeatable format, it makes things much easier to follow when you review them later.

A typical prayer journal entry has several sections. Have a look through them below and at the end of this post, I have a prayer journal template ready for you to download, to help you get started!

A Date

This may be today’s date (the date of the current journal entry) or the date of the prophetic word you received. It’s usually best to pick one and stick with it.

In my electronic version, I get both: Evernote automatically allocates today’s date to the note (i.e. the journal entry), while I add the actual date I received that revelation into the note title.

Relevant Bible verse

This could be a particular verse the Lord spoke to you directly or directed you to. – Perhaps you came across it in your daily Bible reading.

It could simply be a verse you are reminded of. For example, a prophetic word given to you by someone else may bring to mind a linked bible passage on the same theme.

What God is saying

This is the specifics of what you believe God said to you or the prophetic words or pictures shared with you by others.

When I write up prophetic pictures I try to put in as much detail as possible: colours, textures, and so on – anything that seems significant at the time. This helps with interpretation, as I mull over it, later on.

Interpretation

Here you put your thoughts and observations on what was said or what you heard.

You may get a very clear direction from the Lord, or you may need to pray more to understand it better. It’s here, and in the next section, where I’m most likely to come back and add more details later.

Other comments

This is a free area to capture anything else that comes to mind. This will help you to weigh what you hear more effectively.

A good way forward is to ask yourself these questions:

• What does the Holy Spirit say?
• What is your spirit telling you?
• How did this make you feel?
• What lessons did you learn?

You don’t have to fill in all these sections for every journal entry, but they are a good prompt to help you capture everything.

This is particularly true of those times where we have a deep encounter with God through his Holy Spirit. At these times, I tend to find that the Lord continues to speak to me over a period of several days. So I often go back later and add extra thoughts and impressions (with the date I got them, of course!).

Start Keeping A Prophetic Prayer Journal: Round-Up + Bonus

To summarise what we’ve said in this article, a prophetic prayer journal helps you to get closer to God and hear what he is saying.

It establishes a written history of your relationship with the Lord, which encourages you as you grow in your prophetic gifts.

You can use any tools you like to write your prayer journal, but the best thing to do is to start now.

To help you kickstart your journal, I’ve got a special bonus available now:
You can download a copy of the prophetic prayer journal template (PDF) featured in this post.

Get your copy using the form below.