If you’ve ever endeavored to establish a daily prayer time, you know from experience it’s not an easy thing to do. The devil will fight you over it, tooth and nail. He’ll put all kinds of pressure on your flesh to keep you from doing it, because he hates it when believers pray.
I remember clearly what a battle I went through over it.
Years ago, when the Lord first led me to get up an hour earlier every morning to pray, I found myself in a real struggle. In my heart I wanted to obey God. But when the alarm went off at 5 a.m., it seemed my flesh had other ideas. Instead of jumping out of bed, my flesh talked to me about how dark and cold it was outside. It told me I should just snuggle down for another hour of sleep. And a lot of mornings that’s exactly what I did.
In spite of my initial failures, however, I didn’t give up. I’d already determined I was going to pray an hour a day. So, if I slept through that hour one day, I made a fresh start the next.
I’d already figured out, even back then, that failure doesn’t have to stop us as believers. When God tells us to do something, although we may not be very successful at it initially, we can just stay on that road until we get our mind and body in agreement with the Spirit and get it done. If we experience failures along the way we can receive God’s forgiveness and grace, get back up and go again. If we quit, though, we’re stuck. God can’t help us because we don’t give Him anything to work with.
I’ll be forever glad I kept giving God something to work with in the area of prayer, because the hour of prayer is the hour of power! Prayer strengthens our inner man. It builds us up spiritually so we can take dominion over the pressures of our flesh and live like the overcomers we were born again to be.
Think about what happened to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and you’ll see what I mean. When He went there to pray in the hours before the Crucifixion, His flesh was drawing back from going to the Cross. His human will was at odds with God’s will. By the time He finished praying, however, His flesh was in submission and his spirit was in charge. He’d received the strength He needed to do everything God had called Him to do and He was ready to go.
* * * article continues on next page * * *
BVOV : 27
