How Prayer Benefits Others

Your prayers can not only change things for yourself, but they can significantly improve the lives of others. It has been said that praying for others is not the least you can do for them, but the most. Your prayers move the heart and hand of God to take action on their behalf.

Through your prayers others can receive most of the same benefits that you receive when you pray for the same things for yourself-including comfort, protection, freedom from anxiety and fear, healing, material supply, and more.

Because you pray you are also in a better position to help others directly. The Lord often uses people as His agents on Earth, so it could very well be that He wants to use you to help bring about the answers to your own prayers. The very fact you pray for others shows that you’re concerned about their happiness and well-being, and this puts you in a position to better understand His loving plan for their lives and how you can help bring it to pass. When you pray for someone who is sick, for example, He may show you how you can help stir their slumbering faith and thereby help accomplish His dual purpose for the affliction: to heal them as a testimony to them and others of His miracle-working power, and to cause their relationship with Him to blossom.

When you spend time with the Lord in prayer, He fills you with the fruits of the Spirit, which include love, joy, peace, longsuffering, temperance, faith, gentleness, meekness and goodness.1 As you receive more of His Spirit, others will see the Lord and His gifts reflected in your everyday life. “We all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”

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