Spend more time in prayer

In Catherine Marshall’s book A Closer Walk, her husband Leonard LeSourd wrote about the beginning of their marriage. “Catherine had huge adjustments to make. She sold her Washington dream house to move to Chappaqua, so I could continue to commute to my job at Guideposts in New York City. My children—Linda, ten; Chester, six; Jeffrey, three—had been through a deeply unsettling two years, adjusting to a variety of housekeepers. They had mixed feelings toward moving into a new house and especially toward ‘the new mommy that Daddy’s bringing home.’ Catherine’s son Peter, who was nineteen, was going through a period of rebellion at Yale…Catherine and I had so many things to pray about that we began to rise an hour early each morning to read the Bible and seek answers together. Her current journal lay open beside us in these predawn prayer times, recording our changing needs and His unchanging faithfulness.” As the pressures of life mount, you need to pray more, not less. Jesus rose before dawn to pray. Sometimes He prayed all night. Other times He left the demands of the crowd to pray. Why? Because your power, peace, joy, and effectiveness are directly related to the time you spend in prayer. Then why don’t we pray daily? For the same reason people join a gym in January and quit by February. Prayer requires discipline that only you can put in place. But it brings great rewards. Hymnist Fanny Crosby wrote, “Oh, the pure delight of a single hour, that before Thy throne I spend. As I kneel in prayer, and with Thee my God, I commune as friend with friend.”