PRAY WITHOUT CEASING

How Can We Pray Without Ceasing?

“Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). How many times have we heard or recited this verse? Yet how often have we stopped to really ponder it? And how can we obey it?
Reading from JC Ryle’s “A Call to Prayer” has stopped me in my tracks and made me consider my own prayer life. It is a necessary evaluation for each of us:

“We live in days of abounding religious profession. There are more places of public worship now than there ever were before. There are more persons attending them than there ever were before. And yet in spite of all this public religion, I believe there is a vast neglect of private prayer. It is one of those private transactions between God and our souls which no eye sees, and therefore one which men are tempted to pass over and leave undone. I believe that thousands never utter a word of prayer at all. They eat. They drink. They rise…  but they never speak to God. They have not one word to say to Him in whose hand are their life and breath, and all things, and from whose mouth they must one day receive their everlasting sentence. How dreadful this seems; but if the secrets of men were only known, how common.”

“Unceasing, incessant prayer is essential to the vitality of your relationship to the Lord and your ability to function in the world,” writes John MacArthur in his book “Alone with God,” but what does “unceasing” prayer mean? MacArthur continues:

“To ‘pray without ceasing’ refers recurring prayer, not nonstop talking. Prayer is to be a way of life–you’re to be continually in an attitude of prayer. It is living in continual God-consciousness, where everything you see and experience becomes a kind of prayer, lived in deep awareness of and surrender to Him. It should be instant and intimate communication-not unlike that which we enjoy with our best friend.”