Short Doesn't Equal Ineffectual
Scripture Reading: Luke 11:1-4
“God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Luke 18:13
“My Lord and my God!” John 20:28
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Luke 23:42
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Psalm 51:10
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Luke 23:34”
“Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” Mark 9:24
“Lord, help me.” Matthew 15:25
“Even so, come Lord Jesus.” Revelation 22:20
This is a partial list of some of the shortest and most powerful prayers recorded in the Bible.
In the early days of my faith, particularly those when I was going through Bible College and Seminary, I was impressed with the grand stories of spiritual giants who would rise early in the day, before the sun’s light had even begun to peek over the horizon and fall on their knees and plead with God for hours on end. I was convinced that this was the standard for effectual praying.
Today, I am still impressed and inspired by Christians whose prayer lives are that consistent, passionate, and devoted. They are and have followed in the footsteps of our Lord, who would often spend whole nights in prayer. May God be gracious and give us all some measure of this kind of spirit of prayer.
What I failed to see back then, is that the effectiveness and power of prayer are not measured with a stopwatch. Those brief prayers above are some of the most memorable and powerful prayers we know of. And I want to encourage you to have a handful of these at your disposal and ready for use regularly.
Paul exhorted us to “pray without ceasing.” Practically speaking, what does that mean? How can a person with a family and a job and a whole list of other responsibilities pray without ceasing? I take it to mean that we should always be walking in a spirit of prayer. To say it more clearly, our first response to everything should be a prayer to God. But how is that possible when we are busy with life? We can’t just drop everything, bow our heads, close our eyes, and enter into a formal time of prayer all the time, can we? Well, no; although that could be something we do at times.
What we can do is take one of these (and there are many others) and make it a prayer we pray silently, in our heart and mind before the Lord as we go throughout our day. For example, the prayer, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner,” can be a prayer for ourselves, but also for all we come in contact with throughout the day. Or “Lord, help me,” can become not only “help me,” but “help John or Bill or Sharon or Cindy…”
You don’t have to pray for hours to pray without ceasing. Short prayers can be effective prayers. Keep them in your prayer arsenal and don’t be shy about firing them off all day long.
So, so good!