Luke 18:1- And He (The Lord Jesus) spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not faint. Our Lord goes on to tell the parable of the "unjust judge" or I like to call it the parable of the "desperate widow". Prayer is to a man's spiritual health as food is to his physical health. He may be able to go a couple days without it, but he will not be able to properly function and it will only be a matter of a short time before he dies. A man's physical health is not only based on how often he eats but what he eats. I sense as Christians we lack so much in prayer not only in quantity, but also in quality. We lack in quantity because we are not seeing our desperation and we lack in quality because we are not purposing to conform our prayers to Scripture. It was John Bunyan who said; "Thou art not a Christian that art not a praying person." A Christian is one who is like the woman in the parable who continually cries out to the judge because of her desperate need. We as Christians are those who are disturbed over our sin and coming to God often because we see our helplessness Without Him. We must flee to Him for we have no other refuge from the barrage of sin ( our own remaining wickedness), the world, and the devil, but the carnal man does not see the onslaught of these enemies so he continues in prayerlessness or just a enough to ease the conscience. However the Christian not only continues in prayer because he recognizes his enemies, but also because he finds great pleasure in being in the presence of God. I would also want us to understand that we ought to judge the quality of our prayers. Let us be consistently mingling God's word with our prayer. Our minds ought to be so saturated with God's word that as we pray we should hardly be able to discern where our meditation on Scripture ends and where our prayers begin. Brothers, let us remember, that our work in the ministry or in all of life is vain if it is not saturated in prayer.
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