We all know that prayer needs to be an essential part of our lives.

And if you’re like me, we would love for the Lord to answer all our prayers instantaneously. However, we know from experience this is not always the case!

Oswald Chambers was quoted as saying, “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.

“Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results.

“We don’t want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of ‘good time’ is seldom in sync with ours.”

While our prayers may not be answered immediately, we know the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man or woman radically changes the world around us.

Charles Spurgeon once said, “We cannot all argue, but we can all pray; we cannot all be leaders, but we can all be pleaders; we cannot all be mighty in rhetoric, but we can all be prevalent in prayer.”

Let’s commit to spending more time in prayer today.

Make sure you don’t allow the enemy to rob your time to pray—for it’s in prayer that we tap into God’s unlimited power that makes demons tremble!

Confess faults to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous one avails much. James 5:16

–by George Whitten