When my husband was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery, I began to call family members. My sister and her husband came right away to be with me, and we prayed as we waited. His sister listened to my anxious voice on the phone and immediately said, "Can I pray with you?" When my pastor and his wife arrived, he too prayed for us (James 5:13-16).
Oswald Chambers wrote: "We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all". At its root, prayer is simply a conversation with God, spoken in the expectation that God hears and answers. Prayer should not be the last resort.
In His Word, God encourages us to engage Him in prayer (Phil. 4:6). We also have His promise that when "two or three are gathered together" in His name, He will be "there in the midst of them" (Matt. 18:20). For those who have experienced the power of the Almighty, our first inclination often will be to cry out to Him. Nineteenth-century pastor Andrew Murray said: "Prayer opens the way for God Himself to do His work in us and through us". Pray first!
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