Prayer as a Priority

Praying with passion takes time, and the amount of time we allocate to prayer will be the true measure of how much we value it. Satan seeks to convince us we don’t have time for prayer. What he doesn’t announce to us are the losses that occur when we don’t make prayer a priority.

In her book Living Faith, Helen Roseveare relates that she and fellow missionaries agreed to have a weekly prayer meeting. More pressing busyness repeatedly crowded it out. There were ungraded papers, unanswered letters, other committees, and a quiet desire for one evening for their own affairs. Always there seemed a valid excuse for the prayer meeting to wait until next week.

“And so in 1958 we lost Bakiogomu; in 1962, Bumukumu...” On and on she listed promising young graduates who had fallen to the pressures of the enemy. She wondered if those losses would have occurred if she and her fellow missionaries had invested more time in prayer.

Even when crowds waited for Jesus and open doors were all around, often the best use of His time was to turn from them and find a place to pray.

Sometimes we think, This work must be done although I’ll have to skip my prayer time. But Jesus teaches us that we’re not to do our work first, and then ask God to bless it. If we give first place to prayer, the service growing out of such prayer will be charged with power.

Jesus, please help prayer to have the same priority in me that it had in Jesus.

“Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:15, 16).