Pray in the Spirit at all times

Pray in the Spirit at all times and on every occasion. Stay alert and be persistent in your prayers for all believers everywhere.

Ephesians 6:18, NLT

When we reach the end of the list of God's armor, we also reach a moment of truth. First, will we put on the armor? Second, once we have put on the armor, what will we actually do? Our tendency will be to rush off and begin tilting with windmills! But note what Paul's "marching orders" turn out to be: pray. We struggle with what it means to pray "at all times and on every occasion." We live in a physical world, but we are also spiritual beings. The bridge between physical and spiritual happens in us, moment by moment. God calls us to spiritual warfare. Though we may feel like the struggle is physical, it's primarily spiritual. As difficult as we may feel life in this world to be, we haven't understood the nature of the real struggle until we see how our physical experiences fit into the infinitely larger universe of the spirit. We try to make the spiritual a small and optional part of life when just the opposite is true. Our physical lives are brief moments in the span of spiritual eternity that is part of our gift from God. So, prayer isn't just work. Prayer is war. Prayer isn't time out from the battle. Prayer is full-on engagement in the fray. As long as I think of prayer as effort and work, it simply boils down to a matter of lifestyle and convenience. But if I begin to think of prayer as warfare, I am faced with the issues of life and death. Even a casual look through Scripture leads one to the conclusion that prayer is serious business. Paul told the Thessalonians, "Never stop praying" (1 Thess. 5:17). Words like these are both challenging and puzzling--particularly for us as men. If we can only do one thing at a time, how can we pray and get anything else done? One way to answer this question involves developing an attitude that sees our relationship with God like the RAM (Random Access Memory) component in a computer. As men, we typically function more like a simple program that can only open one file at a time. God has access to everything, and we need to have instant access to him at all times. We can ask God to be the default setting in our minds, so that every time we are not fully occupied with some task, we revert to prayer mode. We will definitely need God's help if we want to "pray in the Spirit at all times and on every occasion."