Why are you too busy not to pray

Prayer does not come naturally to any of us. In
our more honest moments, we all admit it’s a
struggle to pray as we’d like. And yet there is no
avoiding the fact that Scripture insists God has
hard-wired the universe in such a way that He
works primarily through prayer. No doubt He
could have chosen some other method, but in
many ways, He has made Himself subservient to
the prayers of His people. He has conditioned a
good portion of His blessing upon our
willingness to pray.
So why is it that our prayer lives so often fall
short of our prayer desires? I would hazard a
guess that the number one reason is the
busyness of our lives. We are so busy.
Believe it or not, the One who taught us to pray
had a life remarkably like our own. Jesus was an
incredibly busy man. The Gospels record only
fifty-two days of His life, but what a whirlwind
of activity is chronicled in those few hundred
hours! If you wrote down the events of each day
on fifty-two sheets of paper, I doubt if you would
have enough room on each page to report even
the major incidents that took place.
The busiest day of our Lord is recorded in the
first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. This day was
crowded with miracles to perform, lessons to
teach, people to heal, disputes to settle. It was a
day totally dedicated to reaching out to people
and ministering to their deep needs. How
draining that kind of intensive ministry can be!
It’s hard to understand the strain on both mind
and body if you’ve never endured a day of full-
force, non-stop ministry.
He didn’t just preach several sermons and go
home to a nice, filling dinner. One after another,
people came to him for healing, for
understanding, for a gentle touch. Minute after
minute, hour after hour, from the rising of the
sun until the pale glow of sunset, Jesus worked.
People with problems flocked to Him. A son was
ill. A daughter crippled. A neighbor was
tormented by a demon. Two friends were arguing
over some point of doctrine. And one by one,
need after need, Jesus ministered to them all.
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But He still wasn’t done. Mark tells us, “And
when evening had come, after the sun had set,
they began bringing to Him all who were ill and
those who were demon-possessed. And the
whole city had gathered at the door” ( Mark
1:32-33 ).
The morning after is always the hardest, isn’t it?
You’re exhausted. You have nothing left to give.
Your bed seems like heaven. That’s the morning
that you say, “Well, I guess I’ll just skip it
today.”
But not Jesus. The morning after the busiest day
of His life was the morning He chose to rise
early and pray.
“Oh, but that’s Jesus,” you might say. Following
that example seems impossible, no matter how
much we might want to. For us, survival is the
biggest success story we dare hope for. We are
ordinary people, not the Son of God, and we feel
“too tired” a lot. We’d like to pray more; we
understand that Jesus took time out to pray
after the most exhausting day of His life. But
that’s Jesus, we think; we’re just ordinary
people.
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And yet the very thing that keeps us from
praying is the very reason why we need to pray.
It is the means God has chosen to work through
us. It is an essential tool for life and ministry.
I scoured the New Testament some time ago,
looking for things God does in ministry that are
not prompted by prayer. Do you know what I
found?
Nothing.
I don’t mean I had trouble finding an item or
two; I mean I found nothing. Everything God
accomplishes in the work of ministry, He does
through prayer. Consider:
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Prayer is the way you defeat the devil ( Luke
22:32; James 4:7 ).
Prayer is the way you acquire wisdom
( James 1:5 ).
Prayer is the way a backslider gets restored
( James 5:16-20 ).
Prayer is how the saints get strengthened
( Jude 20, Matthew 26:41 ).
Prayer is the way we get laborers out to the
mission field ( Matthew 9:38 ).
Prayer is how we cure the sick ( James
5:13-15 ).
Prayer is how we accomplish the impossible
( Mark 11:23-24 ).
I could go on listing the myriad divine activities
initiated by prayer, but I suspect you get the
point. Everything we do that’s worth doing;
everything God wants to do in the church;
everything God wants to do in your life; He has
subjugated it all to one thing: Prayer. I am
reminded of a little paradigm I heard years ago
that embodies a crucial truth concerning our
prayer lives:
What we do for the Lord is entirely
dependent upon what we receive from
the Lord, and what we receive from the
Lord is entirely dependent upon what we
are in the Lord, and what we are in the
Lord is entirely dependent upon time we
spend alone with the Lord in prayer.
It is impossible for us to do or to be anything
that God wants us to do or be, apart from
spending time in the prayer closet.
All of us are busy. Life isn’t slowing down, it’s
speeding up. Yet that is precisely why we need
to take time to pray. It is said that Martin
Luther declared he had so much to do, he could
not get through it without spending at least
three or four hours on his knees before God each
morning. Unlike him, we are tempted to think
that, when life slows down, then we’ll take time
to pray. Jean Fleming almost stepped into that
trap. Fleming wrote, “I find myself thinking, when
life settles down I’ll… But I should have learned
by now that life never settles down for long.
Whatever I want to accomplish, I must do with
life unsettled.”
Oswald Chambers puts it all in perspective when
he writes, “Remember, no one has time to pray;
we have to take time from other things that are
valuable in order to understand how necessary
prayer is. The things that act like thorns and
stings in our personal lives will go away instantly
when we pray; we won’t feel the smart anymore,
because we have God’s point of view about
them. Prayer means that we get into union with
God’s view of other people.”
Above all, remember Jesus arose early to pray
on the morning after the busiest day of His life,
so why should we think we can do without it
when busyness crowds into our own schedules?
He is our model. He is our guide. Only when we
follow His instructions and His example in this
crucial area of prayer will we discover the
deepest joy in our adventure with Him.