The Necessity of Prayer

“Now it came to pass in those days that He went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.” (Luke 6:12)

When it comes to Jesus, we tend to focus on the miraculous – the blind eyes, mute mouths, and deaf ears that were opened, the lepers that were cleansed, the dead that were raised to life, etc.  It’s good to focus on those supernatural occurrences because each of them proves that Jesus is the Messiah.  What we don’t spend near enough time considering is the amount of time Jesus spent in prayer.  Today’s verse finds Jesus praying through the entire night!

More than any other Gospel writer, Luke does a great job chronicling some of the times that Jesus prayed.  Many of those times were prior to major events in His ministry (see also 3:21, 5:16, 9:18, 28-29, 11:1, 22:32, 40-46).  Jesus was completely and fully God and there’s no doubt about that.  But, in the incarnation He elected to empty Himself of some of His divine privileges (Phil. 2:6ff).  I take that to mean that Jesus had an even greater need for His Father while He was on the earth.

Has it ever occurred to us that perhaps part of the reason for Jesus’ miracle-working is that He was empowered through prayer?  And not only that, in Luke 6 He was preparing to make a vitally important decision about which twelve men He would select as disciples – a decision that kept Him up praying all night.  If Jesus needed to be empowered through prayer and equipped with the wisdom He needed to make godly decisions, don’t you think prayer is even more vitally important to us?