Topic: Pray At All Times [Saturday May 6, 2017]
Pray at all times (on every occasion, in every season) in the Spirit, with all [manner of] prayer and entreaty.… — Ephesians 6:18
In the verse for today, Paul is basically saying that we are to pray in every circumstance, following the Holy Spirit’s direction, using different types of prayer in different situations. But how do we “pray at all times,” as the Bible instructs? We do it by keeping an attitude of thanksgiving and total dependence upon God as we go about our everyday lives, turning our thoughts toward Him in the midst of doing all the things we have to do and listening for His voice in every situation.
I believe God really wants us to live a lifestyle of prayer and that He wants to help us stop thinking about prayer as an event and begin to see it as a way of life, as an internal activity that undergirds everything else we do. He wants us to talk to Him and listen to Him continually—to pray our way through every day with our hearts connected to His and our ears attuned to His voice.
We often hear about a prayer need or think about a situation and say to ourselves, I need to pray about that later when I pray. That thought is a stall tactic of the enemy. Why not pray right that minute? We do not pray right away because of the wrong mind-sets we have about prayer. It would be easy if we just followed our hearts, but Satan wants to complicate prayer. He wants us to procrastinate in the hope that we will forget the matter entirely.
Praying as we sense the desire or need to pray is simple, and it is the way we can pray continually and stay connected to God in every situation throughout the day.
