5 Things to Pray for Your Heart - Prayers That Change You to Be More Like Jesus - Paperback

Every Christian Wants to Be More Like Jesus. But Are You Praying for It?

The desire is real. You want to grow — in patience, in love, in faith, in holiness. You want the gap between who you are and who Christ is to narrow. And wonderfully, this is exactly what God wants for you too. His will is your sanctification (1 Thessalonians 4:3). He is not merely willing to transform you — he is working toward it.

But genuine heart change does not come through willpower, better habits, or trying harder. It comes by the Spirit’s power — and that means it comes through prayer.

The trouble is, many Christians find their prayer lives reduced to a shopping list of daily requests or desperate pleas to get through the day. Deep, sustained, Scripture-rooted prayer for genuine heart transformation — for the slow, astonishing work of becoming more like Jesus — can feel elusive, vague, or simply hard to put into words.

5 Things to Pray for Your Heart is designed to change that. Rachel Jones has created a warm, practical, and biblically grounded prayer guide that equips Christians to pray for genuine, deep, and astonishing growth in their own lives and in the lives of those they love. Each spread takes a passage of Scripture and draws from it five specific prayers for a particular area of the Christian life — because these are prayers your heavenly Father loves to answer, grounded as they are in his own Word and his own will for his children.

What This Book Covers

Rachel Jones works through the key areas of Christian character and growth, equipping readers to pray for transformation in each one:

• Faith and trust — Prayers for a deeper, more resilient confidence in God — in his goodness, his power, and his promises
• Love and relationships — How to pray for growth in love for God and for others — including the difficult people and the daily frictions of life
• Humility and pride — Prayers for the slow, Spirit-worked loosening of self-centredness and the growing of genuine Christlike humility
• Perseverance and endurance — How to pray for the staying power to keep going in the Christian life when it is hard, discouraging, or costly
• Holiness in specific areas — Targeted prayers for growth in areas where the Christian life is most frequently and most painfully struggled with
• Joy and contentment — Prayers for the deep, settled joy that comes not from circumstances but from knowing and being known by God
• Scripture as the foundation — Each spread draws from a specific biblical passage, ensuring that every prayer is aligned with God’s priorities and promises for his people

What Readers Will Learn

• Why genuine heart transformation comes not by willpower but by the Spirit’s power — and why that means prayer is indispensable to growth
• How to move beyond shopping-list prayers toward deep, Scripture-rooted intercession for real heart change
• What God’s Word says about sanctification — his will and his power to transform his people from the inside out — and how to pray those truths back to him
• How to pray specifically and biblically for growth in love, humility, faith, perseverance, holiness, and joy
• How to use this book to pray meaningfully for a Christian spouse, family member, friend, or small group member
• Why prayers for heart transformation are prayers your heavenly Father loves to answer — and how that truth can fuel expectant, confident intercession
• How to develop a prayer life that is not merely reactive but genuinely formative — shaping you, slowly and surely, into the likeness of Christ

How to Use This Book

5 Things to Pray for Your Heart is flexible, personal, and immediately usable:

• Personal quiet times — Work through it as part of your daily or weekly prayer time, taking one spread per session as a guide for praying for your own growth
• Praying for others — Use it to pray meaningfully and specifically for a Christian spouse, family member, friend, or colleague — picking up whichever spread fits their particular need
• Small group prayer — Equip your small group members to pray for one another’s growth in godliness with greater depth, specificity, and biblical grounding
• One-to-one discipleship — A natural companion for a discipleship relationship — providing a shared, Scripture-based framework for praying for one another’s growth
• Personal response to conviction — Pick it up whenever a particular area of your Christian life is in particular need of prayer — whether your own or someone else’s

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for you if you are:

• A Christian who wants to grow but finds their prayers for spiritual growth vague, repetitive, or hard to sustain
• Anyone wanting to pray more meaningfully for a loved one’s spiritual growth — a spouse, a child, a friend, or a fellow church member
• A small group leader wanting to equip your group to pray for one another’s growth in godliness with greater depth and biblical precision
• A new Christian wanting to understand what to ask God for in terms of their own spiritual formation and growth in Christlikeness
• Anyone who has ever sensed the gap between who they are and who Christ is — and wanted to pray about it in a way that is honest, specific, and genuinely expectant

About the Author

Rachel Jones is an author and editor at The Good Book Company and a member of Grace Church, Cambridge. She is the author of several books in the 5 Things to Pray range, known for her warm, accessible, and practically grounded approach to helping Christians pray with greater biblical depth and confidence. Rachel writes with a genuine passion for prayer and a gift for making Scripture feel immediately applicable to the real situations and struggles Christians face in their inner lives. Her books have helped thousands of Christians and churches develop a richer, more biblically rooted prayer life.

Also available in the 5 Things to Pray range:

• 5 Things to Pray for Your World by Rachel Jones
• 5 Things to Pray for Your Church by Rachel Jones
• 5 Things to Pray for Your City by Helen Thorne & Pete Nicholas