I became a Christian when I was nine. I don’t recall what the chaplain of my Methodist primary school preached, but something within me felt compelled to give my life to Jesus.

At the time, my family believed in a mix of Chinese religion and ancient traditions. I knew that professing my newfound faith would earn me the ire of my mother. My father would not approve either.

Going to church was completely out of the question.

When I was old enough to care about the eternity of my family, I shared my faith with my younger sister who also became a Christian.

For my parents and grandmother, however, I knew there would be no talking to them about Christianity, much less convincing them to convert. I could never bring myself to say: “Mum, Pa, Ah Ma, you are sinners in need of God’s forgiveness.”

As an adult, when I did muster up the courage to say something, my father said: “I don’t need your God. He wasn’t there in my toughest times. I don’t need Him now that I’m okay.”

That was that. So, I could only pray.

Mum became a Christian 10 years later. Grandma followed shortly after. It would take my father nearly 40 years, though, to follow suit. Two years after he said the Sinner’s Prayer and just 10 months after he was baptised, Pa passed away.  

If you have elderly loved ones for whom your heart aches, here are 8 ways you can pray for their salvation.

1. Pray persistently

God, in His mercy, may turn their hearts to Him the moment you pray. But it may just as well take years, as it did in my case. Be prepared for the long game.

I admit there were days when I thought all my prayers would come to naught. I couldn’t see how my parents would ever come to the faith. What kept me going was the single thought: If I don’t contend for their eternity, who will?

Jesus understood the difficulty of praying for something over an extended period of time. To “show them that they should always pray and not give up”, He told His disciples the Parable of the Persistent Widow in Luke 18.

In the parable, the judge “neither feared God nor cared what people thought”. Yet he gave the widow the justice she sought because she “kept coming to him”.

How much more would our just and righteous God give to us who plead for the souls of our loved ones?

So, as 1 Thessalonians 5:17 encourages us, “pray without ceasing … for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus”.

Don’t give up.

2. Pray for God to soften their hearts

God has the ability to both harden and soften hearts.

For those who persistently set themselves against Him, like the Pharaoh who refused to acknowledge Him time and time again, He turns them over to their hardness and hardens their hearts (Exodus 7:3).

But God also soften hearts. So many times in Old Testament, He talks about removing from the Israelites their “heart of stone” (Ezekiel 11:19-20, Ezekiel 36:26-27) and giving them new, pliable hearts, that they may know Him and be His people (Jeremiah 24:7).    

Ask God to remove from your loved ones their hearts of stone and replace it with new, softened hearts where God’s Spirit can find a home.

3. Pray for God to open their spiritual eyes

Their refusal to believe is not just a matter of the stubbornness of their own hearts. It is spiritual warfare.

Paul tells us that “the God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the Gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). 

So pray for God to “open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith” (Acts 26:18).

Pray also that “His light shines in their hearts that they may have the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

4. Pray for open doors

I never did muster up the courage to truly share the Gospel with my parents. On both occasions, it was circumstances that opened the door for them to be receptive to the message.

Not long after I started working, my father was retrenched. He had had that one job all his life. With only O-Level qualifications and being on the wrong side of 50, there was little hope that he could find another job.

Desperate, my mother implored me to pray for him. So my cell group and I prayed. At the time, my father was in an industry that was dominated by his former organisation. Yet, against all odds, he managed to find a job in the same industry after just a few months. He would go on to work till his retirement.

Not long after that, someone slipped an evangelistic tract under our door. It was not the first time this had happened, but somehow my mother picked up the tract and, instead of tossing it into the bin, read it.

When I returned home from work that day, she told me: “I became a Christian. I said the prayer at the end of that booklet.”

She got baptised and attended church with me for the next nearly 30 years till she passed away.

As for my father, he received Christ when he was about to go for an operation – the first in his life – for hernia. He had quietly lived with the condition for 17 years until it caused complications that required emergency surgery.

With uncertainty looming over his head, he finally relented and prayed the Sinner’s Prayer with me.

Pray that God uses situations to speak to your loved ones.

5. Pray for other labourers

After my mother became a Christian, she shared the Gospel with her mother – my grandmother. There was no way I could have done it myself given that my Hokkien was limited to conversations about food.

My grandmother, who was living in a nursing home by then, became a Christian.

Jesus tells His disciples that “the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into His harvest field” (Luke 10:2).

This is the same prayer we can pray.

6. Pray against specific strongholds

Your parents and grandparents may be of a different faith. Even if they profess to have no religious affiliations, they may have beliefs and experiences that prevent them from embracing God.

My father harboured anger and bitterness because of his difficult childhood. His father had perished during the Japanese Occupation. His mother, just a teenager herself, was pregnant with him at the time.

When he was 10, his mother remarried and moved to another country, leaving him in the care of their landlady. He effectively became an orphan. Though he was smart enough to go to pre-university, he could not afford to do so. At 17, he started working.

Where was God in all of this? If He is real, why was He a silent witness to his personal tragedies? Those were the questions my father would hurl at me when I even dared to say how much God loves us.

Mere argument alone would not have been able to convince him, nor my mum who was gripped by fear most of her life.

Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 10:4-5: “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

Pray for God to tear down every stronghold that sets your loved ones against Him.

7. Pray for opportunities to demonstrate Christ’s love

Our words may not hold sway with our families, but our actions might.

Jesus reminds us to “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

Peter echoes this in 1 Peter 2:12: “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day He visits us.”

Pray for God to help you live in such a way that, by your good example, your parents’ hearts may be moved.

8. Pray in faith

Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1). 

Pray in faith that while you may not see results yet, God knows your heart.

Jesus Himself had unbelieving family members. In John 7:5, we are told that “even his own brothers did not believe in Him” despite living with Him for 30 years and knowing of all He had done and taught throughout His three-year ministry.

It would only be after his death, in Acts 1:14, that his family was recorded to be among the disciples gathered in the upper room to pray. Even Jesus had to wait for His earthly family to believe.

Pray in faith knowing that when you do, you are praying according to the Father’s will, because He does not want anyone to perish but wants everyone to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9).

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