• When you don’t know how to pray, pray anyway! Ignorance is no excuse.
• When you don’t feel like praying, pray anyway! Depression is no excuse.
• When dullness sits on you like a vulture, and a you can’t muster enough enthusiasm to change channels, much less to pray, pray anyway! Boredom is no excuse.
• When you see no need to pray and no reason to intercede for those about you, recognize this as a sign of impending danger and pray anyway. Blindness is no excuse.
• When you’ve grown spiritually lazy and feel that you’ll never be able to pick up your Bible and read it the way you once did, especially pray anyway. Laziness is no excuse.
• When you don’t understand what the big deal is about prayer, and you think it’s overrated because it never did you much good, pray anyway. Immaturity is no excuse.
• When you’re too tired to remember your own name, and you know God will understand if you don’t pray, pray anyway. Fatigue is no excuse.
• When you’re embarrassed to be back before God, confessing the same sins and admitting the same failures, come on and pray anyway. Shame is no excuse.
• When you’ve been unfaithful and know it and you feel that burden of guilt that makes you want to run and hide under the porch, pray anyway. Sin is no excuse.
• When the nagging voice of the enemy keeps telling you there is no God and even if there were, He’d never have anything to do with a nobody like you, you, pray anyway. Unbelief is no excuse.

We can bless ourselves immeasurably by rescuing our prayer life from bondage to our emotions and circumstances. There is no time and there are no conditions in which prayer is not necessary, not helpful, and not the right thing to do.

Let us pray.

“I do not mean to make an idol of health, but it does seem to me that at least some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least. When we lie down to sleep at night, we offer our full appointment calendars to God in lieu of prayer, believing that God–who is as busy as we are–will surely understand.”
–Barbara Brown Taylor

Give us a greater hunger, Lord, than we have ever known.
Help us to wait in one accord until Your pow’r is shown.
Keep us Your children on our knees, beseeching You with mighty pleas
Till floods of blessing like the seas sweep over all Your own.

Give us a sense of urgency that will not be denied.
Give such desire Your work to see, till ease we cast aside.
Give us soul-hunger and soul-thirst, till hearts with longing almost burst,
Till we could wish ourselves accursed if souls but reach Your side!

Lord, now begin Your mighty work; make bare Your holy arm.
0 God, forbid that we should shirk, or to this age conform!
Reveal Your Spirit’s mighty pow’r;
oh, come upon Your church this hour!
By Your own working, Lord, empow’r, till Satan’s forts we storm.

Help each of us to do our part; 0 Lord, may we not fail.
Give clearest guidance to each heart, till highest mounts we scale.
Use us however You may choose; we would no burden, Lord, refuse;
But get us, Lord, where You can use and mightily prevail.

Oh, send the promised Holy Ghost upon us as we kneel.
We need His holy working most, till men conviction feel.
Lord, this is still the day of grace; have mercy on our dying race.
Revival send to every place; Your miracle reveal.

-Wesley L. Duewel