Meeting With GodПримерок

Guarding Your Prayer Time

The Lord has led me to take the following steps to guard my prayer time and withstand all satanic conspiracies. I believe these steps are meant for you as well.

1. Make communion with the Lord your primary goal in life. 

This must be a life-and-death decision on your part. Communion in prayer and study in God's Word cannot be optional. Your thought shouldn't be merely that you ought to pray but that you cannot survive without prayer! Job declared, “I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food” (Job 23:12). 

Only when prayer becomes important enough will you make the time to do it. Yet, most Christians, including pastors, neglect prayer simply because they don't recognize its importance and effectiveness. I know that as a pastor, I dare not minister to people until I first minister to the Lord; otherwise, I will be an unprofitable servant. 

The truth is that it is impossible to waste time when you are in prayer, seeking God. Furthermore, outside the secret closet, the praying man or woman accomplishes more in less time, with less hurry and sweat. 

The most effective work for God we'll ever do is on our knees, anyway. While the prayerless run helter skelter, to and fro, attempting great things, the praying Christian is hard at work moving kingdoms, shattering strongholds and, in the process, becoming a giant with God.

2. You must consider your appointments with God more sacred than any appointments with people, no matter who they are! 

How embarrassing it must be for heaven to see the way we Christians give so little regard to the majesty of our God, the King of glory. We’re often flippant in the way we keep him waiting. At the drop of a hat, we'll suddenly cancel plans to meet with him in his courts, all for the least trifling thing! 

Can you imagine someone keeping the creator God of the universe waiting, while that person lingers to view his favorite TV program? Yet that is what most of us do! Even worse is that we often don't bother to show up in God's presence at all. It’s not that we forget our appointment with him, but that we willfully refuse to appear before him! Isaiah lamented, “He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him” (Isaiah 53:3). When I allow interruptions to come between me and my appointments with the Lord, I am hiding my face from him and not appreciating him! 

3. You must reject every interruption that is within your power and take spiritual authority over those interruptions you discern to be supernatural! 

Of course, some of my interruptions are my own doing, and they are mostly nonsense. There is nothing conspiratorial about many of the interruptions I allow during the day. But, beloved, you must constantly be aware that Satan can and does conspire to interrupt you in supernatural ways when you have committed yourself to prayer and seeking the Lord!