Practical Steps to an Effective Prayer LifeSample

Our Motivation for Prayer

Praying without ceasing is maintaining an ongoing conversation with God throughout the day. No one prays 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The idea is to live your life in a condition in which you can practice prayer, being mindful of God and the spiritual needs around you.

Yet, there is a sense in which we also need to set time aside for prayer. We see this in the life of our Savior, when He would pull away from everything to spend entire nights in prayer to His Father. So, besides a moment-to-moment conversation with God, there can be times when we pull aside and devote ourselves to the spiritual discipline of prayer.

Your prayer doesn’t change God’s mind, but God has chosen to work through it, so prayer matters and changes things. But prayer also changes us; we need times of devotion, where we meditate on the Scriptures and pray according to the will of God. As we do that, not only does God work through prayer and things change, but we change too. If we are living in an attitude of meditation on Scripture and devotion to God, our lives are changing. So, we need both kinds of prayer. We need to have that ongoing conversation with the Lord, and we also need those private devoted times of prayer that change us and change situations.

It is good to begin your day with prayer. It sets the trajectory for everything else in that day. It is also good to end your day with prayer. There’s no better way to go to sleep than to go to sleep praying, to make that be the last thing that takes place before you close your eyes: to commune.

It’s important, too, to take time to pray right before special situations. You’re about to counsel someone, do you need the Lord in that situation? You’re about to preach a sermon; do you need the Lord in that situation? You’re about to have a difficult conversation with someone; do you need the Lord in that situation? We should have that constant awareness of our neediness. Without Christ, as our Lord told us, we can do nothing. If we’re mindful of that fact, we will pray.