The Priority and Place of Prayer in Your Life Holds the Same Priority and Place for God

Prayer can’t be put on the back burner or considered as a secondary force in this world. To do so is to place God in that position and association, it is to make God secondary. The prayer department is an all-engaging force, and it must be this way, to be a force at all. Prayer is the sense of God’s need and the call for God’s help to supply that need. The priority and place of prayer is the priority and place of God. If you give prayer the secondary place in your life; it is the same as to make God secondary in our life’s affairs. To substitute other forces for prayer, retires God and it will show in everything you do.

Prayer is an absolute necessity for the proper carrying out of God’s work. God has made it so. This must have been the primary reason why in the early Church, when the complaint that the widows of certain believers had been ignored in the daily administration of the Church’s aid, that the twelve Apostles called the disciples together, and told them to look for seven men, “full of the Holy Spirit, and wisdom,” who they would appoint over that caring work, adding this important statement, “But we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word.” They had to have realized that the success of the Word and the progress of the Church were dependent, in a primary sense, on their “giving themselves to prayer.” God could effectively work through them in proportion as they gave of themselves fully to prayer.

The Apostles were as dependent upon prayer as we are today. Children, work, church activities and life it’s self may so keep and absorb us as to get in the way of our praying; and when this is always the case, evil results follow. It is better to let the work go by default than to let the praying go by neglect. Whatever affects the intensity of our praying affects the value of our work. “Too busy to pray” is not only the keynote to backsliding, but it mars even the work already done. Nothing is done properly without prayer for the simple reason that it leaves God out of the picture. It is so easy to be seduced by the good to the neglect of the best, until both the good and the best die. How easily may people, even leaders of the Church, are led by the dangerous tricks of Satan to cut short our praying in the interests of the work! How easy to neglect prayer or shorten our praying simply by the request that we have Church work to do. Satan has effectively disarmed us when he can keep us so busy doing things, we don’t stop to pray.

“Give ourselves continually to prayer and the ministry of the word.” The Revised Version has it, “We will continue steadfastly in prayer.” The implication of the word used here means to be strong, steadfast, to be devoted to, to keep at it with constant care, to make a business out of it. We find the same word in Col_4:12, and in Rom_12:12, which are translated, “Continuing instant in prayer.”