I firmly believe that prayer is one of those essential, life-giving daily “musts,” if we are going to live well spiritually. Those who know how to call upon the name of the Lord in prayer are going to have supernatural strength, they will have “their wits about them,” they will have an internal compass to know what steps to take and which direction to travel. There will be a calmness and stability that is exhibited in the way they do life. For too many believers, prayer is an act of desperation rather than an act of daily consecration.
Prayer is a gift that gives us an opportunity to check-in with God every day and to access the benefits that come from hearing from Him.
Here are some of the tremendous benefits of prayer:
Prayer reminds me I am never alone.
Satan wants you to feel alone. He wants you to think you are the only one. He wants you to feel walled off and left out in the cold. Prayer is God’s gift to us to remind us that He is always there. When you talk to God, you aren’t talking to yourself. You aren’t talking to thin air. You are having a conversation with the Almighty God, Emmanuel, who is with you. You can be confident of that on the authority of Scripture:
Joshua 1:9-The Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.
Psalm 94:14 (NLT) The LORD will not reject his people; he will not abandon his special possession.”
Isaiah 41:10-So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
Hebrews 13:5-NEVER will I leave you. NEVER will I forsake you.
So, just the exercise of prayer, the very act, becomes a trigger, to jog our memory and to snap us out of a sense of isolation as we acknowledge that God is with us. Prayer does that. It acknowledges that God is in our midst.
Prayer is an act of faith. One way you exercise faith is to bow your head on the regular and to talk to the God you can’t see but believe by faith that He is there. Prayer is the flexing of spiritual muscles routinely in a way that will build your faith up. Over time you will become spiritually strong, resolute, firm, and able to stand because you have prayed the price in prayer.
When you pray you aren’t only exercising faith to believe God is there, but in prayer you are also conditioning your spirit to accept that He will listen and act to meet your need. Hebrews 11:1 tells us that Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. I mean, what good would it do to talk to God about your issues and concerns if you didn’t actually believe He would do something to help you. I mean, why bother? When you pray you are stretching that faith-muscle.
Prayer is an act of humility. When you stop and pray, you are expressing that you have needs that you cannot meet on your own. You are admitting you don’t have the wisdom for the next step. You are looking outside of yourself for strength and power to move through a situation. You are acknowledging God as your Source. You are laying your life and your will before God and are acknowledging His ways are higher and better than any solution you could come up with on your own.
And what does Scripture say about those who exercise humility? Proverbs 3:34 says God gives favor to the humble. The KJV says God gives grace to those who are humble. I’ll take either one, how about you? I’ll take the favor of God on my situation. How about you? I’ll take the grace of God which is power infused into my life that will enable me make it through. I believe Jesus could only endure what He endured on the cross because the Father had supernaturally infused Him with the grit and grace to do it. It was like God front-loaded Him with all that was needed in order to be successful, and you know it was beyond belief hard. You know it was horrendous. Jesus could never have endured Calvary if He hadn’t exercised humility and received favor and grace in Gethsemane.
Prayer is preventative medicine.
In Matthew 26:41, in that Garden of Gethsemane experience, Jesus told the disciples, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” What I take away from this verse is that prayer can strengthen me before temptation comes and it can give me what I need ahead of time to resist every temptation. Jesus acknowledged the weakness of the flesh. It doesn’t take much sometimes to get us to look the wrong way, to take the wrong step, to do the wrong thing. Why? Because we are weak, and this verse helps me understand that something is conveyed to me, in my weakness, when I pray, that will help me avoid whatever trap Satan is setting for me.
Jesus said as we pray, we will be wise to Satan’s schemes AND we will gain the spiritual savvy we need to escape his snares. Prayer shines a spotlight on what the Bible calls “the way of escape.” (I Corinthians 10:13) When you pray, God begins to whisper, “Here’s the door. Here’s the escape hatch. Here is the way out of this peer pressure. Follow Me.” The place to resist temptation is in prayer before you get into the situation itself. It’s tough to say “No” to something in the heat of the moment, but if you have aligned your will with the will of God in prayer, He promises to come to your rescue in times of weakness.
There is a direct correlation between how much and how often we pray and how victoriously we will live. Plain and simple. I also believe that as we stay in prayer, the temptations become less and less tempting, less and less powerful. They will lose their appeal. They will lose their attraction. They will lose their allure. I believe that because I believe prayer whets our appetites for the things of God instead of the things of the world.
Finally, I believe Prayer is an invitation to the supernatural. God says in Jeremiah 33:3, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.” Anybody interested in a tour of the unsearchable things of God?
Now listen, Satan can only show you what he has access to, and that is the things of this world. BUT GOD, He can show you deep things, things beyond the natural, and into the realm of the supernatural! What do you want to see, believer? If you want to see the unseen, if you want to know what isn’t perceivable to the human eye, if you want to understand what defies logic, if you want to ascertain the heart of God, start praying.
Prayer reminds me I am never alone.
Prayer is an act of faith.
Prayer is an act of humility.
Prayer is preventative medicine.
Prayer is an invitation to the supernatural.
If you want to live well, learn to make prayer a routine part of your daily life.
