Have you ever noticed how often people say, “Well, all we can do now is pray”? I read about one woman who responded to that statement by saying, “O my! Has it come to that?” It is a shame that we think of prayer as a last resort rather than our first response. Perhaps even worse is the fact that we leave the impression that better things could be done. We treat prayer as a last ditch wish, rather than a justified request made to our Heavenly Father– God Almighty. We seem to have more confidence in pills or the surgeon’s scalpel than we do in prayer. While the skill of the doctor is important we need to view him as a mere instrument in the hands of the Great Physician.
Certainly prayer is not to be an excuse to not do anything else, but until you’ve prayed you have not done everything, not even the first thing or the best thing. We haven’t done all we could or should until we have prayed. Nothing we do is as good or as effective as it should be without prayer. Prayerlessness expresses an attitude of pride in that it says I don’t need God. When we pray we bring God into the picture and express our sense of dependence upon Him and our confidence in Him– and that always gets God’s attention!. Regardless of how good or bad our situation appears to be we ought to “pray without ceasing“. In fact we should pray as though everything depends on it, because it does! At this very moment we have dear loved ones in great need—“pray without ceasing“! As James said, “...ye have not, because ye ask not.“(Ja. 4:2)
