THE IMPORTANCE OF PRAYER

Lately the subject of prayer has come to the fore in my life. It seems that every Christian I know feels much the same way. We all know how important it is and we all know we don’t make it a great priority in our lives.

The word pray (in one form or another) appears well over 300 times in the English Bible. That doesn’t include the actual prayers of the Bible where a form of the word may never be used. If there are 1189 chapters in the Bible and a little more than 31,000 verses, that means that on average 25% of the chapters in the Bible involve prayer. Or, we could say that about 10% of the verses in the Bible involve prayer. I am concluding from this that prayer is as important as we believe it to be.

So why is it so hard to devote ourselves to prayer? I think there are a variety of reasons. I’m afraid the greatest reason is that we don’t really believe in the power of prayer. If we, as the Church of Jesus Christ, really believed in the power of prayer our Prayer Meetings would be the most important meeting of the week. Through my years of ministry my own experience has been that Prayer Meeting is the least attended meeting of the week. We have such a great need to grasp the importance of prayer. Andrew Murray said, “We must begin to believe that God, in the mystery of prayer, has entrusted us with a force that can move the Heavenly world, and can bring its power down to earth.” M. E. Andross said, “When prayer has become secondary, or incidental, it has lost its power.” Sadly, I think we have lost belief in the power of prayer. We would be wise to hear the words of John Wesley who said, “God does nothing except in response to believing prayer.”

Another reason we neglect prayer is because of time. We are so busy with our daily schedules, who has time to pray? We miss the point. Martin Luther said, “I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer.” We need to understand that prayer is not time spent ‘taking away from ministry,’ it is ministry. I think R. A. Torrey was right when he said, “We are too busy to pray, and so we are too busy to have power.”

Still another reason for our lack of prayer is that we tend to put more faith in our services and programs than we do in the power of prayer. E. M. Bounds said of this, “What the church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use - men of prayer, men mighty in prayer” R. A. Torrey said concerning this, “We have a great deal of activity, but we accomplish little; many services but few conversions; much machinery but few results.”

D. L. Moody, was a great evangelist and the founder of the Moody Bible Institute. R. A. Torrey said of him, “Out of a very intimate acquaintance with D. L. Moody, I wish to testify that he was a far greater prayer than he was preacher. Time and time again, he was confronted by obstacles that seemed insurmountable, but he always knew the way to overcome all difficulties. He knew the way to bring to pass anything that needed to be brought to pass. He knew and believed in the deepest depths of his soul that nothing was too hard for the Lord, and that prayer could do anything that God could do.”

If we truly want to see the Lord do great and mighty things, we must become men and women of real, deep, heart-felt prayer. After all, doesn’t the Scriptures tell us, “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective” James 5:16?