Richard Roberts
In Luke 18:1, we read how Jesus taught that “men ought always to pray, and not to faint.”
Of all the commands in the Bible, this is the only one I’ve found in which the phrase “ought always” is used.
What does this phrase mean? It literally means “at all times.” This phrase suggests to us that every moment of our lives is an acceptable time to pray. It also suggests that we must have an urgency and a constancy of prayer, for there is not a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour, or even a moment in which we should be out of communication with God. We need ALWAYS to be in what the great preacher Charles Spurgeon called “a spirit of prayer.”
Jesus gave His teaching about prayer in a time when men had turned prayer into a ritual. They prayed at certain times of the day, but only then. No matter what else might be happening when the time of prayer came, the religious people dropped everything and prayed. They had developed a rigid, strict prayer system. And it was to people with this mindset that Jesus said, “There’s no hour that isn’t prayer time. Every hour is a good time to pray.”
Friend, that’s a good word to us today. We can pray any place at any time, and beyond that, we can be in an attitude of prayer all the time. I believe this is what it means when the Bible says that “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We can be in constant relationship with the Lord.