I have a list with the names of people (my family,my friends, and people I came to like) and I pray for their salvation regularly. I put this list before the Lord and pray for them as it comes from my heart. But I have a few questions about this kind of prayer. My first question is, does it make any difference if the person for whom I pray lives far from me, on another continent and doesn’t even know me very well? My other question is, how can I make the prayer for a person’s salvation the most effective?
The salvation of mankind is the one thing the Lord wants most in all the world (2 Peter 3:9). When you pray for another person’s salvation you praying for something that’s in His will, and you are also fulfilling His commandment to love one another. It doesn’t matter where the person is, or even if you aren’t well acquainted. And there’s no special formula. It just needs to be a sincere prayer, straight from your heart to God’s.
I think we all understand that deciding to accept the Lord’s pardon for our sins is a matter of personal choice and nobody can make that choice for us, not even God.
But we should also understand that one of the Holy Spirit’s primary tasks is to convict people of their sins (John 16:8) and bring them to the foot of the cross for a life changing encounter with the Lord who died for them.
I truly believe that He is energized by our prayers on behalf of our unsaved friends and loved ones. The more fervently we pray, the more influence we can have on the outcome.
“This is good and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:3-4)