Sweet Hour of Prayer

“Then He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, "What! Could you not watch with Me one hour? Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." (Matthew 26:40-41)

Can you hear the frustration in Jesus’ voice? “Could you not watch [even] one hour?” No one would dispute that the secret of Jesus’ power came from His extended prayer time with the Father. Yet, like the sleepy disciples, many of us see time in prayer as a burden or an option. We do not hunger and thirst for the Jesus kind of power. The majority of believers perhaps do not spend close to an hour a day in unbroken fellowship with the Father, yet for Jesus, this is place to start!

In all fairness, the word translated “hour” in most Bibles can also be translated “time” or “season.” But no matter how you translate it, the sense of urgency for His disciples to tarry for an hour is just as real today. Yet realizing the pressing necessity to come away with Him for an hour, we should never allow it to translate into bondage. The hymn writer expresses what so many have found through the centuries, that this extended prayer time should be a “sweet hour of prayer.”

We would do well to make prayer a discipline by setting aside a pristine hour, or some designated period on a daily basis. The “spirit” in us longs for it and we will always feel unsettled without it. (“the spirit indeed is willing”) Begin with 15 minutes and be faithful to that time, and you will soon find that your spirit longs for more. Indeed, you will soon wonder how you ever succeeded in life without that “sweet hour.”

Our goal should not be to spend so much time in prayer, but rather, to come to the place where the Spirit man is transcendent and the Flesh subdued. There is a shifting that that takes place in the atmosphere around us as the mind begins to fixate on spiritual things. There becomes less of us and more of the Holy Spirit leading the prayer. There is more listening on our part. The petitions are Spirit-led, the intercession is deeper and more compassionate. Tarry a little longer and you may even find holy anger for injustices rising up. Proclamations and declarations against evils in the earth will find utterance. In short, your prayers become like the prayers of Elijah, “powerful and effective.”

Remember that Jesus has not completed His earthly ministry. Though He is in heaven, He is very much preoccupied with building His Church and completely overthrowing the principalities and powers that still rant against His right to rule. The expression of His concern is through His ministry of the Intercessor (Heb 7:25, Rom 8:34), and He still beckons us with an urgency to join Him in a daily “sweet hour of prayer.”