Withdraw to Pray

Ever feel like the busyness of life gets so thick you can barely breathe? Dread getting out of bed in the morning because you know the enormous workload ahead of you? Jesus understood only too well the incredible demands ministry and the busyness of life places on a person. Read on to see how Jesus dealt with it.

Luke 5:15-16 NIV
15 Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. 16 But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

Jesus was at a point in His ministry when He was on the A-list of preaching ministers. In today’s equivalent Jesus would be packing the stadiums with his ministry crusades. People followed him as word went out about the rabbi who gave you free food (feeding of the 4,000 and 5,000), free healing, free deliverance ministry and even free teaching…his podcasts and all His resources would have been made freely available to all who sought Him out. Imagine His series on the Beatitudes!

In Luke 5:16 we see a secret in Jesus’ ministry that sustained Him through the gruelling task of ministering to a nation of hungry people: “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places to pray”. There are 3 key things here:

1. The busier He became the more Jesus sought out LONELY PLACES.
In other word Jesus sought out places of quiet and solitude free from distraction, a place free from demands of life and ministry.
2. Jesus did this OFTEN.
The busier life became the more Jesus withdrew to the lonely places.
3. What did Jesus do in the lonely places? He PRAYED.
Prayer is the engine room for ministry empowerment and sanity! No minister (that’s every believe in Jesus) would be complete without a prayer lifestyle. Jesus didn’t just while away His time in laziness but pressed in to prayer. The harder ministry and life became the harder He prayed. Hebrews 5:7 “During the days of Jesus life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.” The disciples understood the power of Jesus’ prayer and asked Him to teach them how to pray (see Luke 11).

The more famous Jesus became, the busier life became. The busier life became, the more important prayer became. The antidote to a busy life is to take time out to pray.

Martin Luther once said,”I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer. Martin Luther

E.M. Bounds said, “The men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on their knees…If God is not first in our thoughts and efforts in the morning, He will be in the last place the remainder of the day.”

It seems almost callous of the son of God to neglect the people who needed Him and perhaps there were those who would criticize Jesus’ apparent neglect of the needy. Yet Jesus was demonstrating to us the importance of knowing your limitations. This is for those of you who struggle in your busyness to let go of the “important projects” that demand your personal attention: it CAN wait! There are other solutions.

Jesus understood there will always be need in this fallen world and, while His capacity to minister was great, it had limitations. If Jesus understood His limitations, how much more should we understand and work within our capacity? God gives you permission to rest!

In our quest not to neglectful others we can invariably neglect ourselves. If I’m no good to myself, I’m no good for ministry. Learn the balance. You can’t keep running the engine when the tanks are empty…