A powerful practice for prayer

Friday, October 9th, 2015

Prayer has always been a struggle for me, and I know I am not the only one. There’s a reason that books on prayer continue to flood our bookshelves.

Very few of us pray as often and as earnestly as we would like.

Very few of us are confident that we pray well.

Fewer still feel like we really get prayer.

I have read the books and sat in the seminars and heard the sermons and even preached a few of my own.

Along the way I have learned many truths and picked up many practical tips.

Little by little, bit by bit, they have helped me grow in my knowledge and understanding of prayer.

And, I trust, they have helped me to actually pray.

Never resist the least urge to pray

There is one practice I find myself working on these days more than any other, and I think it may be the most important of them all.

It is a simple one: Never resist the least urge to pray.

I cannot remember where I first heard that. Was it Joel Beeke? Was it Martyn Lloyd-Jones? Was it a Puritan writer? It may well have been all of them.

The truth behind it is simple: It’s never the wrong time to pray.

Those impulses are invariably good. After all, it’s not like Satan or the old man will be the ones directing me to call out to God rather than resting in selfishness or self-reliance, is it?

Like me, you probably feel that urge to pray throughout your day.

You feel it after church when you are speaking to a struggling friend.

Something in your mind says, “I should pause right here and right now and pray with her.” And you fight a momentary battle over whether or not you will actually say, “Let me pray for you.”

You feel it when you are lying in bed beside your wife, you are about to go to sleep, and you think, “I should pray with her.”

But even something so simple can feel like the hardest thing in the world. Continue reading

Tim Challies is a Christian, a husband to Aileen and a father to three children aged 9 to 15. He worships and serves as a pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Ontario, where his primary attention is mentoring and discipleship.