Prayer Examples
How’s your prayer life going?
Somebody once said that “A family without prayer is like a house without a roof—exposed to every wind that blows, and every storm that rages.”
I believe that this is true. A lack of prayer is dangerous to the Christian. It leaves you open to all sorts of dangerous things.
Jesus Prayed
Christians, by definition, are people of prayer. Jesus is our main example of this. We are meant to be like Jesus in our way of life, and if you study the life of Jesus, one of the first things you notice is how he prayed!! You can’t read Luke’s gospel without concluding that Jesus was a man of great prayer:
- Luke 4 begins with Jesus going out into the desert to fast and pray, preparing for His ministry.
- Later in the same chapter, people have spent all day swarming around Jesus looking for healing, and we read that “Jesus went out to a solitary place” (4:42). There’s no doubt that his quiet alone time was spent in prayer, because we see this again soon:
- In Luke 6.12, Jesus “goes out to a mountainside to pray and spent the night praying to God”, and then in the morning chooses his 12 disciples.
- Luke 9:29 sees Jesus ‘praying in private’, and in Luke 11:1 we read “One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
- He even spoke about how he prayed for others: “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail.” (Luke 22:32 NIV11)
- And later in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest, we read how “He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed.”
Clearly, Jesus prioritized prayer! In all situations he prayed.
The Apostles Prayed
And the disciples followed his example. The book of Acts records that just as Jesus prayed, the disciples prayed!
- Acts 1:14 says “They all joined together constantly in prayer”,
- And the famous verse describing the early church in Acts 2:42 says “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”
You get the picture I’m trying to paint. Christians pray. Because if Jesus needed to pray and connect with God the Father in prayer, how much more do we need to prau?
“A family without prayer is like a house without a roof—exposed to every wind that blows, and every storm that rages.” Don’t do that to yourself. Like Jesus and the apostles, pray instead!
