Why the Devil Wants You to Stop Praying

The Devil in his cunning,

Wants you to delay,

To stop you from your praying,

From praying every day.

He will use all sorts,

Of distractions and temptations,

In order to discourage you,

From receiving Godly revelations.

So God says eternally,

From His living Word,

“Pray continuously” in humility,

And you’ll be as free as a bird.

Not that prayer,

At all, is a license for your will,

But as you pray,

You will almost certainly,

Get the Holy Spirit’s fill.

***

Praying is a direct act of obedience. Perhaps prayer is the supreme act of obedience. Because prayer essentially means we are surrendering our will to know and to do God’s will, prayer is about as close as we can get to an act of faith.

Of course, there are many temptations and distractions that the Devil has designed to get in our way, and to perturb us from the goal of connecting with the Divine.

The enemy of souls would be happy if we did anything but be completely committed to God. Satan will allow us to say we believe, yet we meet real resistance at times when we endeavour to put into practice what we believe.

The greatest example of our belief is prayer, for the simple reason that prayer requires most faith. This is because prayer often feels like we are doing nothing. Oftentimes we have no idea whether our prayers have made any difference. Yet, all that is expected of us is that we ply our faith, and never more so than via prayer.

If we will continue to pray even when we may occasionally doubt the effectiveness of prayer, God must be pleased that we continue to pray, however feebly, because the more doubt we experience the more faith it takes to overcome those doubts.

***

It’s no secret that the Devil wants us to stop praying; to stop obeying God. But our greatest demonstration of faith is to keep praying, especially when we doubt our prayer’s effectiveness.

If we keep presenting faithfully before the Lord there will be some vindication for our prayers. God is working as we present faithfully because of our prayers.

Our faith connects us with God, and his righteousness becomes ours because we are justified by our faith alone.

We please God all the more when we pray through doubting seasons, during the times we feel God has let us down, and even when we are about to give up.

Faith is exemplified when praying when doubting, and the more those doubts are many the stronger the faith to keep praying.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.