Spare Change - April 2023
The Pattern of Prayer
If you study the patterns of Jesus’ life you will notice one thing. He spent a significant amount of time in prayer. The Bible records several instances when Jesus went away by Himself (Matt. 14:23, Luke 5:16, Mark 1:35, Mark 6:46). This was a normal pattern for Him. Why would Jesus, of all people, need to spend a lot of time in prayer? Maybe He
understood something about the power of prayer that we just don’t get.
In Luke 22:39-46, Jesus takes His disciples to the Mount of Olives to pray. Verse 39 tells us that this was His usual custom. This meant that Jesus regularly went to the garden to pray. This fact was so known to His disciples that Judas is able to easily find Jesus when he betrays Him. How many times did Jesus go to the garden to pour out His heart to His Father? This time, Jesus is grieved beyond what any of us can comprehend. He knows that He will suffer greatly and die for the sins of mankind. The fact that Jesus turned to prayer in this season should not be lost on us. When Jesus is faced with the hardest test of His life, He goes to deep, soul-moving prayer. He prayed so much, His spirit was so grieved, and He was in such agony that His sweat was like blood dripping from His body.
The fact that Jesus turned to prayer during this time should give an obvious indication of how important prayer is. Jesus also instructed His disciples to pray so they would not enter into temptation. What was the temptation of that night? To abandon their faith. Even though Jesus had warned them that He would be tortured and killed (Matt. 16:21-23), they still did not fully understand what was to happen. Jesus' main weapon was prayer and that is why He instructed His disciples to be committed to prayer. During prayer, the disciples ended up falling asleep and when Jesus was arrested, they all abandoned Him except for Peter and John. Peter ends up denying Jesus three times as He prophesied.
This all points to the fact that prayer is essential in the life of a believer. When the disciples were faced with their biggest temptation from Satan himself, what did Jesus tell them to do? PRAY! Do you have the same emphasis on prayer in your life? Do you underestimate its power? I feel like many of us treat prayer like something we say is
important, but we don't really practice it like it's important. It is one thing to say you value something, however, your actions show what you value.
If prayer is the weapon that Jesus says it is then we need to be committed to it. Not just with trite promises like, “I’m praying for you,” but with actual prayer. Why does it feel so awkward for Christians to stop what they are doing to pray about a situation wherever and whenever the need arises? It should be the normal outpouring of God’s work in our lives to pray for people on the spot. We should also be committed to daily times of prayer. We should be persistent in our praying as Jesus told us in Matthew 7:7-11. Jesus tells us to persistently pray as if someone is knocking at a door repeatedly until someone answers. Let’s knock on Heaven’s door with our prayers until the Father answers.
Jesus believed that prayer was effective and lived it out in His life. We should follow His example and make prayer the priority of our Christian faith. I wonder what a difference it would make in our lives and the lives of those around us if we committed to being people of prayer. The church needs to remember the words of Jesus in Matthew 21:13, “My house shall be called a house of prayer.” Our churches, as well as our lives, should be filled with prayer. Let’s look to Jesus and make prayer the normal pattern in our lives.