Taking Time To Pray

I think many of us struggle with taking time to pray.  We live in what seems to be such a fast pace world trying to juggle all the things we want to get done.  But, how many things are more important than prayer?  I know that we can be so busy with work and kids, trying to get them from this event and that event plus so many other things that seem to need our attention that we feel we don’t have time to pray.  Sometimes even our ministries seem to take up a lot of our time so we try to do them with very little time spent in prayer.

What is prayer anyway?  It is having a conversation with God, either verbally or silently, it can be done alone or with other people, but it is a time to spend with the Lord and speak to Him about whatever is on our mind.  Sometimes people think they have to use the great sounding words they may have heard a pastor speak or they think their prayers will not be effective.  Sometimes people think they have to pray long drawn out prayers, which is not true, but you need to believe that when you pray God will answer your prayer in His time and in His way.  

Did you ever listen to a young child when they pray?  They pray what is on their mind at the time, and sometimes we may even laugh at some of the things they say, but they haven’t been indoctrinated in the way that we think we need to pray, so they just pray from their heart.  We could learn some things from a child.  Prayer is very important and without it we should not expect much progress in our walk with the Lord.  

There is another thing that is important about prayer and that is that we do not need to do all the talking, but we need to also listen and allow the Lord to speak to us.  Jesus thought it was very important to pray and He took time out of His busy schedule to do it and He even taught His followers to do it.  He taught them what we call the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9-13:

“In this manner, therefore, pray:

Our Father in heaven,

Hallowed be Your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts,

As we forgive our debtors.

And do not lead us into temptation,

But deliver us from the evil one.

For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

The Lord’s Prayer is also recorded in Luke 11:1-4.

Jesus also taught about using His name in prayer in John 16:19-26.  He also prayed for Himself, He prayed for His disciples and for future believers in Luke 17.  So you can see that prayer was important to Jesus and should be important to us also, so we need to take time out of our busy day to do it.

Then there is Jesus’ agonizing prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26:36-46, Mark 14:32-42 and Luke 22:39-46.  Jesus took time out of His busy day to pray, so if He thought it was that important so should we.  Sometimes we can get so caught up in doing kingdom work, and other things, that prayer ceases to be a priority and that is a big mistake.  If Jesus had to get away from the crowds at times to pray, how much more do we?  Something to think about!  May God bless you and yours and may you have a super day.