You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.
—John Bunyan (The Golden Treasury of Puritan Quotations, 235)
On a lonely hillside in the dim light before dawn, a man sits by himself, praying. He rehearses the Scriptures, sings lines from the Psalms, praises God, and pours out his heart. An observer might imagine the man a monk or at least a devotee of the solitary, contemplative life — so desolate is the setting and so early the hour.
But not long before, a whole city had gathered around this man, begging for his attention. Even now, the city stirs again, remembering last night’s wonders and wanting more. And in a few moments, the man’s friends will find him and tell him of needs to meet, tasks to do, crowds to answer, people to see. He prays in the eye of a hurricane.
Rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. (Mark 1:35)
Busier than a businessman, more sought out than a celebrity, wanted as a mother of many toddlers, and bearing a task as big as the world, Jesus prayed.
The Lord’s Prayers
The Gospels offer only a few glimpses into the routines of Jesus’s life outside his normal ministry. They show him traveling often. They show him eating at many different tables. They sometimes show him resting. But perhaps above all, they show him praying.
He prayed by himself and with others (Matthew 14:23; John 17:1). He prayed in crowded places and in quiet corners (John 11:41–42; Matthew 14:13). He prayed as a regular daily pattern and with spontaneous expressions of joy, grief, longing, and need (Luke 5:16; 10:21–24; 23:34, 46). The multitudes saw his public power; the disciples saw the life of prayer that made it all possible (Luke 11:1).
But such a prayer life did not come easily. How could it, when his popularity could make even mealtimes hard to come by (Mark 3:20; 6:31)? Jesus prayed as he did because he prioritized prayer — sometimes ruthlessly so. And in his prayer life, we find a model for our own.
Prioritizing Prayer
The idea of prioritizing prayer sounds wonderful — until prioritizing prayer means not doing something we would very much like to do. We can talk about prioritizing prayer all we want, but we don’t truly do so unless we regularly set aside second-best priorities, some of them pressing, to get alone with God. The life of our Lord provides the best illustration.
Sometimes, Jesus prioritized prayer over ministry. When Jesus prayed in the pre-dawn dark outside Capernaum, he could have been ministering. “Everyone is looking for you,” his disciples told him, even at that early hour (Mark 1:37). The needs were real and urgent: the sick needed healing, the wayward needed teaching, the lost needed saving. But first, Jesus prayed.
Sometimes, Jesus prioritized prayer over sleep. In the same story, he rose “very in the morning” instead of sleeping very early in the morning, even though yesterday’s ministry lasted long after sundown (Mark 1:32–35). On another occasion, “he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12). Even more than his body needed sleep, his soul needed prayer.
Sometimes, Jesus prioritized prayer over planning or thinking. The all-night prayer time in Luke 6 came just before Jesus “called his disciples and chose from them twelve” (Luke 6:13). The decision of which twelve men to choose required careful thought and discernment. But more than any of those, it required earnest prayer.
Sometimes, Jesus even prioritized prayer over the people who were with him. “Now it happened that as he was praying alone, the disciples were with him” (Luke 9:18; 11:1). As we’ve seen, Jesus often prayed in solitude (Luke 5:16). But he needed to pray more often than he could get away. So, without ignoring or neglecting others, Jesus sometimes built a prayer closet right in the midst of company.
False and Tyrannous Urgency
Now, to be sure, ministry, sleep, planning, and people were all priorities for Jesus. All throughout the Gospels, he gives people his deep and undivided attention. His ministry bears the marks of careful planning (Luke 9:51). He sometimes sleeps while others are awake (Mark 4:38). And one time, while on his way “to a desolate place by himself,” he sees crowds in need and resolves to pray later (Matthew 14:13, 23).
On many days, Jesus probably fulfilled all these priorities (and more) without sacrificing any. And that’s a worthy ideal for us to strive for. But the lesson for our prayer lives is this: When Jesus’s priorities competed, prayer didn’t lose. When his schedule was pressed, he didn’t go prayerless. Ministry could wait, sleep could be shortened, and other priorities could take second place, but one way or another, he would pray. Even when circumstances stole his solitude, he either prayed in public or made sure he prayed later.
Jesus’s example moves me to ask some hard questions:
- How often do I let busyness — even the best kind of busyness — justify prayerlessness?
- When was the last time I set my alarm earlier than normal to make sure I pray?
- How often do I pause my planning or careful thinking to engage in the seemingly (!) unproductive act of prayer?
- When my typical prayer time gets taken, how creatively and desperately do I find some way to still pray?
Many of us in the modern world live with a tyrannous and often false sense of urgency. Loud voices within and without tell us we have so much to do, that other people are depending on us, that perhaps tomorrow will afford more time for prayer. But if anyone had reason to heed such voices, it was Jesus. And he didn’t. In a ministry filled with urgent needs, urgent opportunities, urgent counsels, urgent dangers, he treated prayer as the most urgent priority of all.
What did he know that we don’t?
What Jesus Knew
Above all, Jesus knew himself, and Jesus knew his Father.
Jesus knew himself. “Without ceasing to be divine,” Donald Macleod writes of the Son of God, “he took on the qualities of human nature: createdness, finitude, dependence, ignorance, mutability, embodiedness, and even mortality” (The Person of Christ, 194). Jesus prayed because, even as perfect Man, he needed his Father. He needed wisdom in decision-making, fortitude in temptation, discernment in teaching, joy in sorrow, strength of soul in otherwise unbearable agony.
Do we know ourselves? As humans, we have all the needs Jesus had. And as sinners, we have so many more. So do we wake up knowing ourselves prone to wander without God — prone to speak corrupting words, follow foolish paths, waste precious time, and believe the devil’s lies?
Jesus also knew his Father. He knew him as the God who speaks stars into being, who scatters nations and sends plagues, who fills dying wombs with life and fells enemy armies as numerous as the sand on the seashore. He knew him as the God with power incomparable, wisdom unsearchable, compassion unimaginable, beauty beyond compare, and steadfast love better than life.
And he knew him as the God whose ear is open. He gives good things to his children (Matthew 7:11). He answers the asking, opens to the knocking, and leads the seeking to find (Matthew 7:7–8). He sees in all places and hears at all hours (Matthew 6:6). He knows what we need but still loves when we speak (Matthew 6:8). And though we may not understand his timing, he does not delay long toward his own (Luke 18:7).
If we know him, what busyness can keep us from him? And what urgency can speak louder than his invitation to draw near?
What Wonders Prayer Has Won
In a world of self-sufficient, godless efficiency, oh how many wonders prayer has won! By prayer, a few loaves and fish fed five thousand (Matthew 14:19), and Lazarus left the realm of the dead (John 11:41–42), and sorrow became a sanctuary of communion with God (Matthew 14:12–13, 23), and Peter’s faith did not fail (Luke 21:32), and words of forgiveness flowed from the cross (Luke 23:34), and the cup of agony was set down empty (Matthew 26:42), and frail and failing disciples were kept (John 17:11).
God wants us to run and build and work in this world, but not apart from prayer. Jesus knew as much. So, though busy, though sought out, though needed, though weighed down by a world of urgent responsibility, Jesus prayed. Will we?
