Prayer Time

Prayer Time is the most dreaded time for the devil, because it shows that the Chrisitian are spiritually alive and are breathing. Many Christians do not realize this and complain that their busy lives leave them no time to pray, but as it has been said 'If you are too busy to pray, then you are busier than God intended you to be.

' So build a fence around a certain part of the day and reserve it for contact with God through prayer. The best Prayer Time is in the morning when your mind is fresh and the day is still before you.

The Psalmist said, 'In the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee, and will look up.' (Psalm 5.3) Don't try to find a time for prayer, make time. If you go through the day trying to fit a prayer time into you schedule you will fail.

Make it the first priority after you awake from sleep to keep a prayer appointment with the Lord. We need not, and should not, limit out prayers to such appointed moments with God.

We can pray anywhere - in the street, on the way to work, traveling in a bus or train. But these spontaneous and unpremeditated prayers must be seen as extras. Growth and development in the Christian life demand firmness with ourselves in relation to fixed and definite Prayer Time.

One great prayer warrior said 'Those who do not provide for a Quiet Time in the morning, do provide for an un-Quiet Time during the day. The probabilities are that you will have to take time off during, or at the end of the day, for regret, for penance, for eating humble pie, or for realizing a sense of frustration, emptiness and futility.

' This is not to say, of course, that if for genuine reasons you miss your Quiet Prayer Time in the morning God is going to 'punish' you by siphoning off your spiritual peace. He loves you too much for that.

No, what it means is that when we deprive ourselves of a regular contact with God through prayer we remove ourselves from the power that make for effective Christian living.

A diver who would regard it unnecessary to check that his airline is in working order before he descends into the depths, would be no more foolish than the Christian who descends into the stifling atmosphere of today's world without getting his breathing apparatus of prayer connected with the pure air of heaven above.

When we become spiritually anemic and pale, it is usually due to self-inflicted asphyxiation. A traveler tells of journeying through the Panama Canal. He says 'The great sea gates were closed upon us. We, who had sailed the oceans, were blocked, shut in, helpless, our freedom gone.

But lo, we felt a great lifting, great fountains were opened up from beneath, and to our astonishment that great ship was lifted thirty-five feet in just seven minutes.Then the gates opened and we glided out on a high level, out on the bosom of Lake Gatun.'

The morning prayer appointment does that - it shuts you in with God, the door closes upon you and you seem so enclosed, so helpless. And then God's infinite resources begin to bubble up from within, you are lifted silently, powerfully, effortlessly, without noise or strain, onto a higher level.The door opens and you glide out on to a higher level of life.

Those who practice daily contact with God through prayer are often amazed how easily they transcend worries and fears and resentments, and live on a higher, more positive, level.

The answer is quite simple: it's the result of being shut in with God. William R. Inge reminds us: 'It is quite natural and inevitable that if we spend an average sixteen hours of our day in thinking about the affairs of the world, and only five minutes in thinking about God . . . this world will seem two hundred times more real to us than God.

' The great Christian and Philosopher, Blaise Pascal, once declared, 'Nearly all the ills of life spring from this simple source, that we are not able to sit still in a room.

' What, if in that stillness we meet with God? Would not all our fears, our hesitancies, our doubts, be hushed in the quiet of God?

Isaiah said, 'We have been waiting for thee, be our strong arm;' (Isaiah 33.2 Moffat) 'morn after morn, deliver us, all forlorn.

' When we 'all forlorn' meet with Him 'morn after morn' then He becomes 'our strong arm', our Deliverer.

To those who say they do not need to have a specific Prayer Time because they pray anywhere and everywhere, I would say you cannot maintain the spirit of prayer unless you take specific times for prayer.

Experience has shown that unless one has a regular organized Prayer Time then it loses its energy, its force and its power.

Read about the PRAYER APPOINTMENT