We ought to pray as though everything depended on prayer—it does! Although there are other important things to do, we can’t succeed at any of them if we refuse to pray. The daily devotional “Daily in the Word has this to say about the matter:
“Though there is certainly a place for public and corporate prayer, and I have been in some wonderful prayer meetings in my life, there is no substitute for personal private petitions to our Father in Heaven. The praying that we do in public can never carry the depth of emotion and feeling that our private prayers have. The Scottish pastor Thomas Brooks said, “The power of religion and godliness lives, thrives, or dies, as closet [private] prayer lives, thrives, or dies. Godliness never rises to a higher pitch than when men keep closest to their closets.”
Prayer—prevailing, powerful, Bible prayer—is a spiritual discipline. It requires an investment of time, energy and emotion. A few words in a Sunday school class or a church service are no substitute for meaningful and personal time spent with God. We need to make prayer a habit just as Jesus did. Again and again in Scripture we read that He separated Himself from His disciples to spend time with His Father in prayer. Often Jesus was extremely busy with the crowds pressing in to see Him and teaching and healing, so He began the day with prayer. “And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed” (Mark 1:35). There is no more important priority that we have as believers than to spend time with God in prayer.”
