1 Peter 5:8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
As believers, we have an enemy who desires our destruction and the dishonor of God's Name. He knows our weak points and he presses home his attacks precisely when we are most likely to stumble and fall. He also knows what will strengthen us and make us more powerful adversaries and he expends his efforts to make sure that we spend as little time and energy as possible on such things.
Getting to the prayer meeting (or to our own private prayer times) is one of the greatest challenges that believers face here on earth. We know that prayer is good. We can recall great seasons of blessing that we have enjoyed in the past during times of prayer. We have read how Bible characters prayed and there were great results. We have seen men and women of prayer in the history of the church who were used by the Lord to achieve remarkable things for Him. We long to be people of prayer ourselves. Yet we are often prayerless and the time we would devote to it seems to shrink away before our very eyes until none is left.
Half an hour opens up in our day. We set ourselves to use it for prayer. We settle down and begin to focus on the task. Just then, the phone rings, or there is a knock at the door. We rise to deal with those things and return to pray. We attempt to focus again but just then we remember a task that we have been meaning to do for some time and we persuade ourselves that if we just take care of it, we will be able to give all our attention to praying. Then the phone rings again. Before we know it, the time is gone and our prayers remain unoffered.
Wednesday night is approaching. It's the prayer meeting night and we really want to go. We get home from work later than expected and we find situations have arisen during the day that have to be dealt with. Dinner gets delayed and we feel extraordinarily fatigued and drained, so we decide that this time we will rest and we will make sure to go next week.
Have you ever noticed that for other things you might desire to do (e.g. going shopping, playing a computer game, doing yardwork, watching a movie, going out to friends' homes for a meal) we have far less obstacles thrown in our way and we are hardly ever as fatigued as when we set ourselves to do something spiritual - particularly to pray?
What is going on here? Why is it so difficult to pray? Why does our flesh rise up to oppose it, Satan tempt us to postpone it and circumstances apparently conspire to prevent it? Surely the reason is this - prayer carries with it an awesome power to advance God's kingdom in ourselves and in others. We have seen how God uses believers' prayers to accomplish His purposes. We have seen that it is a powerful weapon to demolish the strongholds of Satan. Let me ask you this, then - if you were Satan and you understood the power of prayer as a weapon that would weaken you and lead to your ultimate defeat, what would you do? When is the best time to try to mitigate the effects of a potent weapon - before or after it is fired? Wouldn't you do everything you could to stop believers from praying?
If prayer were not as powerful as it is, do you think it would be so hard for believers to pray? Would they meet opposition and temptation at every turn if in fact the weapon had little more power than a squirt gun?
So this reason to pray takes this observation and seeks to profit from it. Prayer must be really, really powerful for Satan to try so hard to prevent it. William Cowper's hymn in an earlier "reason" told us that the Devil trembles when he sees the weakest saint upon his knees. Knowing this, shouldn't we redouble our efforts? Don't we want to demolish Satan's strongholds as God takes and uses our prayers? Shouldn't we shake of our lethargy and our fatigue on Wednesdays and get to the prayer meeting? Shouldn't we unplug our phones and ignore doorbells and realize that there is nothing so important that should take the place of our seasons of prayer?