δέομαι

7 Days of Prayer: Sunday, 13 to 19 September, 2026

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Each day’s prayer entry is drawn from this week’s headlines, noted in my Weekly Roundup. For each we provide four prayers drawn directly from Scripture, just to give some ideas about how to pray. You can pray along with us with these, or freely as the Spirit leads you to pray.

13th Sep. The New Humanitarian sat down with five young people in Tehran and gave every one of them a false name, because their real ones would not be safe. Ziba got engaged forty days before the strikes started and has given the wedding up; at night she checks a flight-tracking app to see whether civilian planes are still crossing Iranian airspace, and only then tries to sleep. Sina is twenty, has sent out two hundred résumés, and has to ask his father — a labourer his whole life — for the money to buy a coffee. Inflation is near 88% and more than a million Iranians have lost their jobs. "We are all deeply exhausted," one of them said, "trapped in this exact same limbo." Pray for them, and pray for the shooting to stop.

You number our wanderings and put our tears into your bottle. Ziba cannot sleep until she has seen that the planes are still flying; count her nights, and the nights of the four others whose real names could not be printed, and keep them in your book. (Psalm 56:8)

Our souls have dwelt too long with those who hate peace. We are for peace, but when we speak, they are for war — so we pray that you will silence the strikes over Iran, and that the men on every side of this fighting would put the weapons down. (Psalm 120:6-7)

You have responded to the prayer of the destitute and have not despised their prayer. Sina is twenty, has sent two hundred résumés, and still asks his father — a labourer all his life — for the price of a coffee. Hear him, and give him work. (Psalm 102:17)

You said, "I am found by those who didn’t seek me," and "See me, see me," to a nation that was not called by your name. Say it to the young of Tehran who have given up the wedding and the job search and cannot see past this limbo. (Isaiah 65:1)

14th. Kidnappers in Nigeria released a video last month showing more than six hundred people taken from a mosque in Niger State, in the north-central part of the country, and now held for ransom. It is worth saying plainly that this was not a church. In northern Nigeria a house of worship is a soft target, and whoever happens to be inside is who the gunmen take. Security has become an election issue, so rescues will be carried out and announced, and neither the rescues nor the announcements will fix what is underneath. A prayer letter for Kano this month asks for something the news never does: that the gospel would take root among the Hausa and change their communities from the inside. Pray for the families waiting, and for the Hausa.

Hagar called you the God who sees. Six hundred people were taken from a mosque in Niger State and their families have a video and a ransom demand and nothing else; see the captives where they are being held tonight, and see the mothers counting the days at home. (Genesis 16:13)

You brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke away their chains. Break the chains on the six hundred held for ransom in north-central Nigeria, and bring them out — not as an announcement before an election, but home to their own doors. (Psalm 107:14)

You said the Kingdom is like seed a man casts on the earth: he sleeps and rises, night and day, and the seed springs up and grows, he doesn’t know how. Sow your word among the Hausa of Kano like that — first the blade, then the ear — until whole communities are changed from the inside. (Mark 4:26-29)

Zacchaeus stood up and said, "If I have wrongfully exacted anything of anyone, I restore four times as much," and you answered that salvation had come to his house that day. Come to the houses of the men living on ransom money in Niger State, and let some of them give it back. (Luke 19:8-9)

15th. On a one hundred-and-forty-kilometre stretch of road toward Mandalay there are forty-four checkpoints — about one every two miles — and each of them charges between five thousand and a hundred thousand kyat to let a vehicle through. The drive normally takes three or four hours. That is what the war looks like on an ordinary day for an ordinary person in Myanmar: not a battle, but a toll on every delivery, every errand, every trip to a hospital. A prayer letter for Yangon asks first for the healing of deep wounds rather than for the fighting to stop, which is the right order in a country where war has quit being an emergency and become the weather. Pray for people just trying to get home, and for a church held together across tribe and tongue.

You told your people they would not go out in haste nor by flight, because you would go before them and be their rear guard. Go before the drivers on the road to Mandalay — forty-four barriers in a hundred and forty kilometres — and guard them from behind until they are through the last one and home. (Isaiah 52:12)

"He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for his Maker, but he who is kind to the needy honors him." Every barrier on that road takes money from a farmer with vegetables, from a family driving a sick child to hospital. We pray you will end this taxing of people who have nothing spare. (Proverbs 14:31)

It is because of your loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, and your compassions do not fail — they are new every morning. Myanmar has had war so long it is no longer an emergency but the weather; bring new mercy tomorrow morning to people whose wounds are years deep. (Lamentations 3:22-23)

You were killed, and bought people for God with your blood out of every tribe, language, people, and nation. Hold your church in Myanmar together across Bamar and Karen, Kachin and Chin, when the war gives every tribe a reason to keep to its own. (Revelation 5:9)

16th. Xu Jilin, a historian at East China Normal University, has spent this year writing about what young Chinese call "lying flat", and his argument is that almost nobody chose it. It is what happens to a generation that grew up with plenty and can no longer see a route to anything it actually wants. Underneath the withdrawal, he says, is resentment at a system that demands constant effort and shares out the rewards unevenly, and he warns China's leaders that it could gather into "a great flood" that is difficult to channel. What a person in that position lacks is not money; it is a reason. Joann Pittman says the church in China is not weak, inactive or passive. Pray that it is standing near them.

You sent the servant into the streets and lanes to bring in the poor and the lame, and when he came back saying there was still room, you sent him further out. Fill your house in China with the young who have stopped competing — let there be a table where no one has to win anything to sit down. (Luke 14:21-23)

"Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw near, when you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them.'" A generation in China has arrived at "no pleasure" at twenty-five. Meet them there and give them back a reason. (Ecclesiastes 12:1)

You still the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, and the turmoil of the nations. Xu Jilin warns that this resentment could gather into a great flood; we pray you will quiet it, and that the unfairness underneath it would be heard and put right before it breaks. (Psalm 65:7)

You said a city on a hill cannot be hidden, and that no one lights a lamp to put it under a basket. The church in China is not weak or passive; let its good works be seen by the young people nearest it, so that they glorify the Father. (Matthew 5:14-16)

17th. Every year in Bukit Mertajam, in the Malaysian state of Penang, tens of thousands of people gather to burn a paper-and-bamboo figure of Da Shi Ye, the Guardian God of Ghosts. It has been done since 1888, when a plague came through the town, and the effigy is built five centimetres taller each year — this year it reached almost nine metres. Ng Chi Wong, who is sixty-nine, has been making them for more than forty years and works with no drawings at all. The organisers explain the purpose without any mystery: to look after wandering spirits, "especially spirits who have no one to worship or make offerings to them." It is fifteen days of care for the dead nobody remembers. Pray for the people carrying that weight.

Because the children share in flesh and blood, you took the same flesh and by your death brought to nothing the one who holds the power of death, and freed those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. Free the people of Bukit Mertajam from a fear they have carried since 1888. (Hebrews 2:14-15)

"Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, these may forget, yet I will not forget you." Fifteen days of offerings are made in Penang for the dead that nobody remembers. Let the people making them learn that you have forgotten no one. (Isaiah 49:15)

You sent Paul to open their eyes, that they might turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, and receive forgiveness. Open the eyes of the tens of thousands who come to the burning this year, and give them that inheritance among those sanctified by faith in you. (Acts 26:18)

When the fire fell on Carmel, the people fell on their faces and said, "the LORD, he is God! the LORD, he is God!" Ng Chi Wong is sixty-nine and has built these figures for forty years without a single drawing. We pray that before he builds another, he would know whose hands made his. (1 Kings 18:39)

18th. The truce that had held in Yemen since 2022 has ended, and the fighting is back: Houthi forces are striking Saudi cities in the southwest and pushing toward the port at Bab el-Mandeb, which is where Saudi Arabia has been sending its exports ever since the Strait of Hormuz shut. A war that had gone quiet is being restarted by a war somewhere else. A prayer letter for Sana'a this month asks God for mercy on the city and an end to the fighting, and it is careful not to ask him to decide it for anyone. It names three peoples to pray for by name — the Northern Yemeni Arabs, the Tihami Arabs, and the Sudanese Arabs living among them. Pray for all three.

At Pentecost the Arabians said, "we hear them speaking in our languages the mighty works of God." Let the Northern Yemeni Arabs, the Tihami Arabs, and the Sudanese Arabs living among them each hear you in their own tongue, in the middle of a war. (Acts 2:11)

We would hear what you speak, for you speak peace to your people — "but let them not turn again to folly." A truce that held for three years has been turned back to folly. We pray you will stop the strikes on the Saudi cities and the advance toward Bab el-Mandeb, and bring every side of it to lay the weapons down. (Psalm 85:8)

You had compassion on the crowd who had been with you three days with nothing to eat, and would not send them away fasting because some of them had come a long way. Yemen has been hungry far longer than three days. Multiply the little that reaches Sana'a, and let there be baskets left over. (Mark 8:1-9)

You bring the counsel of the nations to nothing and make the thoughts of the peoples of no effect. A closed strait moved a country's exports, and a quiet war was started again around them. Bring to nothing the calculations that require Yemenis to be shot at. (Psalm 33:10)

19th. Bud Houston set two numbers side by side. Africa's frontier peoples — those with almost no Christians among them and no movement to Jesus — need something like 5,413 cross-cultural workers. And four countries alone, Nigeria, DR Congo, Kenya and Ghana, hold roughly 123 million evangelical believers. That works out at one worker needed for every twenty-three thousand believers already living near enough to go. The frontier is a single belt running from the Atlantic across the Sahel and up the Nile to the Horn: 493 people groups, 222 million people, and 97% of them Muslim. 143 of these groups are small enough to need just a single family to engage them. Pray for the families deciding.

You asked, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" A hundred and forty-three of these peoples are small enough that one family would do. Put that question tonight at kitchen tables in Lagos and Nairobi, in Accra and Kinshasa, and let many answer, "Here I am. Send me." (Isaiah 6:8)

Paul aimed to preach where Christ was not already named, so that "They will see, to whom no news of him came. They who haven’t heard will understand." Four hundred and ninety-three peoples run from the Atlantic across the Sahel and up the Nile, and no news of you has come to them. Let them see. (Romans 15:20-21)

"Who despises the day of small things?" One family against a people of eighty thousand looks like nothing on a map. Keep the workers already out on that belt from measuring themselves against the size of it, and let your eyes, which run back and forth through the whole earth, rest on them. (Zechariah 4:10)

Men of Cyprus and Cyrene came to Antioch and spoke the Lord Jesus to people who were not their own, and your hand was with them, and a great number believed and turned. Put your hand on the believers of Nigeria, DR Congo, Kenya and Ghana who cross to a neighbouring people and speak. (Acts 11:20-21)

Where do these prayer requests come from? This is a weekly guide to beseeching (δέομαι/deomai, Matthew 9) the Lord of the Harvest for the unreached peoples and places of the world. AI helps me create this, using the Weekly Roundup, my notes, prayer suggestions from the field, prayer guides, past deomai prayer requests, and pre-approved Scriptures. I read through the whole issue before publication. If you're interested in the longer Roundup (out each Friday), click the link below to see a sample.

Check out the free Weekly Roundup, out each Friday