How to Live Care Free

12 Easy Steps For Releasing Any Prayer To God

This article on how to live care free is an introduction to  'Matters of the Heart,' our free eCourse for spiritual growth and emotional transformation.

Cultivating a Carefree Heart

Staying bottled up with concerns is guaranteed to stress you up or depress you down! One of the secrets of the spiritual life is learning how to live care free by praying every concern out of your heart into God's Hands. That always restores inner peace! These 12 'steps' are part fanciful, part descriptive, to show you how this process of letting things go to God actually works. They will give wings to your life in Christ!

1) God Wants To Do Something. This is the part that we don't see and it can really trip us up until our eyes of faith are better focused. Unless God sees the problem and wants to fix it, it won't get fixed! The real effort to bring the needed change begins in God's heart.

2) God Shows Me His Concern. God wants to use me as part of His solution to the problem He sees. To do that He must first show me the problem. Maybe I hear about it; perhaps it is messing up my life. One way or another it gets my attention and raises my concern.

3) Now I Get Stressed About It. My first response is to see it as my problem. Here is where we get tempted to become anxious or depressed, especially if the problem seems bigger than our ability to resolve it. What on earth can be done about it?

4) God Reminds Me To Pray. This is always the Lord's first step into the situation through me. This should be encouraging: why would God lead me to pray unless there was something He wanted to do? But I may lament, 'Is there nothing else to be done?'

5) I Pray But Stay Stressed. Unfortunately, if I have little real confidence in prayer or trust in God's ability, I will speak the prayer to God, but not really give it to Him. You know this! Telling someone about your car's problems is not at all the same thing as leaving it with a mechanic. If I only talk about it, but don't let it go, the inward pressure of the concern increases.

6) God Reminds Me To Let It Go. Again and again He reminds me to cast the care on Him. The Lord is a very patient Teacher! Eventually, I realize that God isn't asking me to live with such a heavy heart about the problem. Just the opposite!

7) I Finally Let It Go Out Of My Heart Into His Hands. Here is where the real transaction takes place. If I don't feel the concern my prayers will have no real substance. But if I keep it in my heart it does no one any good, especially me! My task all along was to put the concern into God's Hands.

8) God Gives Me Perfect Peace. Now that I have given the problem to God, He gives me peace as a sign that I have truly let it go. We may say, 'I know God has heard my prayer.' The truth is He heard all of my previous prayers too. He just never 'heard' me letting it go to Him!

9) I Think About It And Get Stressed All Over Again. Don't laugh! You've done this many times too. We take it back. The living sacrifice crawled off the altar because we didn't see God acting fast enough. Now the peace is gone.

10) God Reminds Me To Pray It Through All Over Again. So I do. This time it's easier to let it go. What a relief!

11) Now He Can Finally Go To Work. Now that the concern is back in His Hands, God can work on it, rather than use it to work on me! Yes, part of this exercise was to train me in the way of trusting my God. Why is that always so hard?

12) Later, He Shows Me What He Has Done. By then, I may already be on to worrying about other problems, but I take time to thank Him for clearing up that old concern and use it to encourage my heart to pray for this new problem.  

The main indicator of an effective prayer life is freedom to trust God with all the concerns of life. Genuine inner peace does not come to us without the surrender of our burdens and concerns to Him, as well as our graceless strivings to rescue the concern with our own hands. We have to commit it to Him for Him to take care of it.

Follow these 12 steps into a life of freedom in Christ!  

Interested in Going Deeper?

Consider taking our free eCourse for Healing. We have designed a complete series for personal transformation, 'Matters of the Heart,' to help Christians gain emotional freedom and inner healing. In all there are 24 Main Healing Lessons and 24 Head to Heart Guides to help you bring your heart to God and receive His Great Heart for you in return!