prayer might find me standing all alone in the middle of a deserted ball field on a clear winter’s day, singing out in that beautiful air “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” I walk a lot, and I’ve often stopped to praise the sunset. I began stopping to praise the sun setter. The sun riser. The already risen Son of God. I have a particular spot on a worn and wobbly bench in a local park that is my prayer place there. I have a corner in my sunroom where I sit, being consciously in the presence of God, sitting down alone in the evening, leaning on him, and talking the whole thing over, filling my mind with images of him. Prayer became astonishing. I began living into the discovery that prayer is the most outrageous, enlivening thing that we can do.
The Hours of Prayer in Scripture— and in Our Modern Lives
Throughout the Gospels Jesus is always going off to be alone with his Father. He would leave in the middle of something (!) to go pray. Jesus needed that. His heart longed for that. Jesus often withdrew to pray (Luke 5:16), going up into the hills by himself, being with his Father there (Matthew 14:23).
And throughout the Bible, there are set times for prayer, specifically the third hour, the sixth hour, and the ninth hour of the day—or 9:00 a.m., 12 noon, and 3:00 p.m.—prayer times observed by the Old Testament saints, the New Testament church, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Three times a day Daniel prayed (Daniel 6:10). And in the Book of Acts, it was the third hour on the day of Pentecost when 120 disciples were in the upper room praying and were filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:3, 15). The New Testament church customarily went to the temple at the hours of prayer. “Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour” (Acts 3:1 KJV, emphasis mine). And Cornelius was in prayer at about the ninth hour when an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a vision, and Peter went up on the housetop to pray at about the sixth hour when he saw a vision of a great sheet, full of all kinds of beasts, let down from heaven (Acts 10:9).
Jesus was crucified in the third hour of the day (Mark 15:25). The darkness at noonday occurred in the sixth hour (Mark 15:33; Matthew 27:45). Finally, at the time of the evening prayer, the ninth hour, Jesus gave up the ghost (Luke 23:44). These hours of prayer are memorials of him who made it possible for us to come boldly before the throne of God in prayer (Hebrews 10:19).
And yet we say: We don’t have time to pray. We imagine that we are the first to have demanding lives. We think that we invented busy. But busyness has always been. Martin Luther said he generally prayed two hours every day, except on very busy days. On those days, he prayed three. Luther was the dictionary definition of a busy man—defending theology, translating the Bible, writing, leading a Reformation, not to mention tending hearth and home. Family and children, the care of others’ lives, the most relentless occupation of them all. Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles, gave birth to nineteen children, of whom ten lived to adulthood. This home-schooling mom prayed two hours every day, and when there wasn’t solitude to pray, she would sit down in a corner and flip her apron up over her head. Her children knew that meant that she was in communion with the very God. Hudson Taylor, that missionary to China who changed the world, lived days far, far too busy to pray, and so he rose at 2 a.m. and prayed till 4 a.m.
How do we get from where we are to this new way of being? How do we arrive at that place of continuous connection, unbroken fellowship, where every breath breathes in his love, breathes out his majesty?
Not by dropping by for a quick “Dear God,” a fast “Thank you for this day. Please bless me on my way. I see our time is up.”
“Well, it’s a start,” we say.
But I have come to think this may not be the case. Perhaps it’s not a start at all but rather an ironclad guaranteed finish, for the simple reason that it is, by design, as doomed to failure as is devoting five minutes a day to any enterprise we deeply value.
“I tried.” “I prayed.” “Nothing much happened.” “I gave it a shot.”
I think the devil must dearly love short prayers, the quick and easy kind where we can dip one toe in, tell ourselves we did it, and console each other: “Prayer is hard.” We shake our heads and say, “It’s not easy,” as if to say God isn’t always there, when truth be told, we haven’t stuck around long enough to find out whether he is or not. We knock on the gates of heaven, then scribble a quick note we stick between the rails, and run back to our busy lives. “I guess nobody’s home,” we say.
“But it’s not practical,” says the voice of real life. “Not with the busyness of modern life.”
But practical is precisely what it is.
It’s how we work. It’s how the world works. We are a civilization built upon the timed and timely foundation of our hour building blocks, cemented with the understanding that time is what’s required to do a thing.
A soccer game takes ninety minutes, no matter how rushed a mother’s day might be. A sitcom (with commercials) ties up the airwaves for thirty minutes—not twenty-nine, not thirty-one. A job demands forty hours every week, if we’re lucky.
We may curse the frantic busyness of the lives we’ve chosen, but nonetheless, even given this, not one of us will rush into work tomorrow morning and announce, “I can only give this job two hours, tops, today,” or hurry to the barbershop, the dentist’s office, or a movie theater with a “Sorry, but I’ve got about ten minutes here to spare.”
The magic word is spare.
We pray in such time as we have to spare.
Which is fine. We can do that. We can do whatever we want.
We can give God five or ten minutes, bending on one knee, one eye on the clock, the motor running.
We can even tell each other and ourselves that it is reasonable.
But let us not pretend our spirits and our God require no more. We need hours—one a day and sometimes more—to spend in mystical communion with the God of the universe, the Creator, our Father and our Lord.
“But who has an hour?”
We all do.
We all have twenty-four.
The reason we do not spend one of those hours every day in prayer is because we do not want to, and we do not want to because we have not spent an hour there.
“But what would I do for one whole hour?” The very thought is alarming.
Ah, but now that’s the easy part.
You pray this prayer: “Our Father who art in heaven,” the whole way through to “the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,” but leave out the last “amen.” And then you pray, “Now my Father and my God, I want to sit in praise and wonder, read Psalms—out loud—sing hymns, and read the hundreds of stories about you in Scripture. And then I want to talk with you about my life, which is so very hard sometimes. And I want to sit and listen, to hear what you will say to me that no one has ever heard before. I want to dive into the mystery that is to be with you.”
I have learned a tender truth in this practice of prayer. It is this: When we please someone, we love him more. I know it works the other way around, but I believe this is also true. When I come to God at my little prayer times throughout the day, I believe I please him, and thinking that I give him pleasure intensifies the intimacy with my Lord. When a child
