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δέομαι

7 Days of Prayer: Sunday, 4 to 10 October, 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.

4th Oct. "We need to change our whole thinking when it comes to the persecuted church in North Korea," Floyd Brobbel of Voice of the Martyrs Canada told Mission Network News. "It's better to think of individual Christians trying to live out the faith that's been passed down to them from family members very carefully." Gathering is itself the danger: North Koreans have a saying, "where two or three are gathered, one of them is a spy." So the Ten Commandments are passed from parent to child and the story of Jesus is still known, while being caught can send a whole family to the camps for life. Estimates run to 200,000 secret believers, perhaps more. On a Sunday when they cannot meet, we pray for the faith handed down quietly at home, and for the families who keep it.

Where any gathering of three may hold an informer, the safest church is a kitchen table. We pray that You would keep these households as the apple of Your eye, and hide them under the shadow of Your wings: the whispered prayer, the remembered commandment, the name of Jesus spoken low before sleep. (Psalm 17:8)

You commanded our fathers to make Your works known to their children, so that the generation to come might set their hope in You. In North Korea that command is kept at enormous risk. We pray for the parents who teach it, and for children who will one day arise and tell their own. (Psalm 78:5-7)

Somewhere a whole family is in a camp because one of them was caught believing. You brought Your people out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke away their chains. We ask You to do it again for the grandparents, parents and children held together for life in North Korea's camps. (Psalm 107:14)

The story of Jesus has outlasted three generations of the Kims, told quietly and never forgotten. Your light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. May it keep shining from house to house in North Korea, until the faith that survived in secret can be spoken aloud. (John 1:5)

5th. About a kilometre from the front line outside Taiz, a man named Ali sits with his goats on a property where two mortars have already landed. He has sent his children to a displacement camp but stayed behind, he told the BBC's Nawal Al-Maghafi: "I am terrified, but I have no choice, we will all go hungry without our animals and die anyway." Since the Houthis seized the port of Mokha on 10 September, the fighting around Taiz, Yemen's third city and home to close to a million people, has intensified, and both sides say they are preparing for a major offensive. The war is widening, too: France is sending troops to guard Saudi energy sites from Houthi attack. We pray for the people of Taiz, caught between front lines that are closing in.

Ali stays with the goats a kilometre from the guns, because leaving means hunger. He is walking through the valley of the shadow of death. We pray that he would know You are with him there, and that Your rod and staff would comfort a frightened man who had no other choice. (Psalm 23:4)

Hagar could not bear to watch her child die, and You heard the boy where he was. We pray for Ali's children and the thousands like them in Taiz's displacement camps. May You hear the voices of the children there, and open the eyes of those who care for them to the well of water. (Genesis 21:14-19)

The war in Yemen now reaches Saudi energy sites and draws French soldiers to guard them. You still the roaring of the seas and the turmoil of the nations. We pray that You would quiet this widening turmoil, and that the guns around Mokha and Taiz would fall silent before more of the world is pulled in. (Psalm 65:7)

Both sides say they are preparing a major offensive on a city of close to a million people. You bring the counsel of the nations to nothing and make the plans of the peoples of no effect. We pray that every plan for that assault, on either side, would come to nothing, and Taiz be spared. (Psalm 33:10)

6th. Nika, a 32-year-old Iranian who fled after protesting against the regime, was freed by a US judge, rearrested within two weeks and flown to the Central African Republic. "I don't know anything about Africa," she told the Guardian, whose investigation counts more than 25,000 people deported to countries not their own. Painful stories like these are multiplying as the US and Europe have both hardened their borders against immigration, especially illegal immigration, and are now taking the step of turning away asylum seekers. Even those who stay feel less welcome: Italy is now planning to ban veils in schools. Yet many migrants who come to America and Europe are meeting Jesus and becoming his followers, and churches grow because of them. We pray for migrants and their children made to feel unwelcome, and for churches in Europe and America to receive them as neighbours.

Nika has been set down in a country she knows nothing about. If we take the wings of the dawn and settle in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand will lead us. We pray she would find Your hand in the Central African Republic, and know she is not lost to You. (Psalm 139:9-10)

You love the foreigner, giving him food and clothing, and You told Your people to love the foreigner because they once were foreigners too. We pray for churches in America and Europe, many of them founded by immigrants, to remember where they came from, and to welcome the stranger at their door as a neighbour. (Deuteronomy 10:18-19)

More than 25,000 people have been sent to countries that are not their own. The LORD preserves the foreigners and upholds the fatherless and widow. We pray that You would preserve each of them, and the asylum seekers now being turned away by Europe and America, and that none would be sent into danger. (Psalm 146:9)

A girl in an Italian classroom may soon be told her veil is not welcome. We pray that the children of migrants, told in many ways that they do not belong, would meet believers who learn their names, and through them hear the One who says, "I have called you by your name. You are mine." (Isaiah 43:1)

7th. Fighting has resumed between Ethiopia's government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front. Ethiopia's army chief, Field Marshal Birhanu Jula, has accused Sudan and Eritrea of standing behind the rebels, saying they could achieve nothing alone "unless they are backed, supported and supplied by Sudan, Egypt and other external powers." Sudan hardly needs another war, because its own war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces has already driven some 14 million from their homes. John Young, writing for the Small Arms Survey, argues that as American influence fades, Sudan's generals and the regional powers around them have grown stronger, which "makes ending Sudan's civil war more difficult." Now two wars share a long border. We pray that Sudan's war and Ethiopia's do not become one, and for the Sudanese refugees and families caught between them.

Less than four years ago the guns fell silent in Tigray, and now they are firing again. You speak peace to Your people, but warn them not to turn again to folly. We pray that the government in Addis Ababa and the TPLF in Mekelle would both hear You speaking peace, and step back from a second war. (Psalm 85:8)

Ethiopia says Sudan, Eritrea and Egypt stand behind the rebels, and in this region neighbours have long armed one another's enemies. You frustrate the devices of the crafty, so their hands cannot perform their enterprise. We pray that every hand supplying weapons across these borders, from any side, would find its plans undone. (Job 5:12)

Fourteen million Sudanese have been driven from their homes, and some now flee toward a border where a second war is beginning. You number their wanderings and put their tears into Your bottle. We pray that the families at the Ethiopian frontier would know that not one step or tear of theirs has gone unrecorded. (Psalm 56:8)

You had compassion on a crowd that had come a long way, knowing they would faint on the road if sent away hungry. We pray for Sudanese refugees walking into Ethiopia. Multiply the little bread there is at the border, until those who have come far are fed. (Mark 8:1-9)

8th. By 2031, one in five Chinese will be 65 or older, projects Li Xunlei, chief economist at Zhongtai Financial International, in a report translated by The East is Read; by around 2050, China will be roughly as aged as Japan is today. The men and women who built its cities are greying too: in 2025 the average migrant worker was 43.3, nearly a third were fifty or older, and more return to their home areas each year. The translators' summary is blunt: "even a substantial recovery in fertility would do little to slow ageing before 2050." At the other end, a record 12.7 million graduates, The Economist notes, face youth unemployment creeping back toward 20 percent. We pray for China's elderly and its ageing migrant workers, and for a church ready to care for a greying nation.

Many of China's old will have one child, or none, to visit them. The psalmist prayed, "Don't reject me in my old age. Don't forsake me when my strength fails." We pray that prayer for them: that the grandmother alone in a high-rise and the grandfather back in an emptied village would not be forgotten. (Psalm 71:9)

They poured the concrete and laid the rails, and now at fifty they are going home to villages that no longer need them. You are not unrighteous, so as to forget their work. We pray that the migrant workers who built China's cities would be honoured for it, and not left with nothing in their age. (Hebrews 6:10)

Twelve point seven million graduates are looking for work that may not be there. We pray that some of them, in these years of waiting, would remember their Creator in the days of their youth, and find in Him a purpose no job market can give or take away. (Ecclesiastes 12:1)

A nation will soon have more grandparents than it knows how to care for. We pray that China's churches would let their light shine in the plain work of visiting, cooking and sitting with the old, so that their neighbours see these good works and glorify the Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:16)

9th. Malaysia was set to begin sending refugees back to Myanmar on 29 September, the first of 5,000 Rohingya that Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim says Myanmar has agreed to take back. The first phase, 1,476 people, was to sail on two Myanmar navy warships and a hospital ship. The Home Ministry calls it voluntary. The UN refugee agency says it has no role and warns that "no one should be sent to a country where their rights or freedoms may be at risk." Rakhine, the Rohingya homeland, is now mostly held by the Arakan Army, which the UN accuses of "numerous abuses and violations." The Economist called them "the world's most persecuted people," and few peoples on earth have less access to the gospel. We pray for the safety of those sent back, and for an open door among a people almost no one reaches.

Fourteen hundred people boarding warships, told it is their choice, going back to the land they fled. We pray that You would keep them from all evil and keep their souls, and keep their going out of Malaysia and their coming in to Rakhine, wherever the ships set them down. (Psalm 121:7-8)

The Rohingya were driven out under the army and now return to land held by the Arakan Army, and both stand accused of abuses against them. You execute righteous acts and justice for all who are oppressed. We pray for justice for this people, and that no one would harm those coming home. (Psalm 103:6)

"The world's most persecuted people," and still most of the world has forgotten them. A mother may forget her nursing child, yet You say You will not forget. We pray that Rohingya mothers in the camps and on the ships would know that they are remembered by You. (Isaiah 49:15)

Almost no one has gone to the Rohingya with the good news, and few speak their language. We pray, as Paul asked, that You would open a door for the word, to speak the mystery of Christ to them, in Cox's Bazar, in Kuala Lumpur, and now in Rakhine itself. (Colossians 4:3)

10th. Cambodia has just hosted a summit to show off its crackdown on the scam compounds, where trafficked workers are made to defraud strangers online. Yet the politically connected men who protect them remain untouched, and the networks are scattering abroad: in Papua New Guinea, police found 39 Indonesians crammed into one house. In Myanmar, the regime claimed to have flattened Shwe Kokko, one of the region's biggest scam hubs, but Myanmar Witness found that the regime and its local militia used AI-generated images to "fabricate the scale of the crackdown," and the Irrawaddy reports the work has resumed. Victims are kept quiet by shame, and their names are traded on lists to be scammed again. We pray for those still held in the compounds, and for justice that reaches the men who protect them.

Somewhere tonight a young man types a lie to a stranger because someone stands behind him. You asked, "Shall the lawful captives be delivered?" and answered that even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away. We pray for those still held in compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar, that they would be brought out. (Isaiah 49:24-25)

Zacchaeus grew rich by exacting from others, then met You and gave back fourfold. We pray for the politically connected men in Phnom Penh and beyond who profit from the compounds and remain untouched, that they would meet You, and that salvation would come to their houses as it did to his. (Luke 19:8-9)

Those who have been robbed often say nothing, and their names are sold so they can be robbed again. They looked to You, and were radiant; their faces shall never be covered with shame. We pray that the scam victims, and the trafficked workers made to deceive them, would lift their faces, free of the shame that keeps them silent. (Psalm 34:5)

Shwe Kokko was flattened only in pictures, and the work goes on. Lying lips are an abomination to You, and those who do the truth are Your delight. We pray for the investigators at Myanmar Witness and the Irrawaddy who keep finding the truth, that they would see clearly and be believed. (Proverbs 12:22)

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