I have always been around people giving prayer requests and we even do them with CAST when we meet. I thought about when someone gives that kind of information to a group of people, what is the responsibility of the listeners and what we do, or dont do, with that information? That is why I came up with the 3 rules of prayer requests and here they are.
1. You have valuable information; so treat it that way.
James 5:16 – confess your faults…that you may be healed.
You need to remember that when someone asks you to pray for them that is valuable information that is not treated or taken lightly. You are petitioning heaven for someone and we need to remember that although prayer is just a conversation with God, its an important one and needs to be treated that way.
2. Pray if you say you will
Phillipians 4:6 – in everything, let your requests be made known to God
One of the greatest sins of the church body is people who say they will pray for someone and dont. You need to realize that the person who entrusted you with prayer is expecting that their needs are going to be lifted up by you.
3. Expectation in prayer is not getting what you want, but knowing that God heard your prayer
1 Peter 3:12 – the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, his ears are open to their prayers
We get mixed up in what we know or think that expectation in prayer is. It is really knowing that God hears us when we speak and that we need to live our lives to the best of our spiritual ability in a way that honors him even if we dont get what we want. Our service to God is not conditional on what we get or dont get from him and that includes our prayers.
Holy Crap 
You could add Marilyn’s rule as #4:
PUSH
Pray Until Something Happens
AMEN!! # 2 is great! I saw this comic once and it was of a guy who saw his friend and he said “oh man, here comes bob; I said that I was going to pray for him…. Dear Lord be with Bob.” and his friend walked up and the guy says “hey Bob I’ve been praying for you”. Thats so true with many of us today, we don’t take it seriously and I think it is sad.
My friend once said, “Just Pray for the person right there because you might forget and this prayer is important to them.”
good post.
Rule #4? I’m confused can you start over please?
That was awesome. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. Have you prayed about it as much as you’ve talked about it. I’ve noticed that I, as well as other people, ask for prayer..or bring our problmes to thoer people more than we just talk to god about it for our own lives. And I definitely am realizing the importance of runle #3!
“Pray if you say you will” — quite so! I used to be (and to some extent still am) the kind of person who says “I’ll pray for you” and probably never gets around to it.
Someone pointed out to me how much cooler (even if stranger) it is when a person says “Can I pray for you right now?” as opposed to “I’ll be praying.”
Ideally, we could do both. ^_^