THE DECLINE
How does the life of a believer decline from praying to prayerless praying? This is what I am going address in this specific chapter. Thus far we have made some bold statements concerning prayer and all I can say is that any minister of God , who has had any success at all, can attribute it to the fact that they considered prayer as a primary job, resulting in ministry that has born much lasting fruit. Somebody once said to me that if the Apostle Paul were here we would have had so many souls in the kingdom and maybe who knows, perhaps the entire world would have been evangelized. How foolish we are! In our laziness, we say: bring us Paul to move with the Gospel and let us get busy with our own work. Men such as Paul enjoyed success because they were willing to pray. They did not waste time with carnal indulgences; they were men who prayed and not men who played. So I am calling you out of that comfort hole of yours to be a praying man, not a playing man.
Proverbs 6: 9-11
How long will you sleep, O sluggard? When will you arise out of your sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to lie down and sleep. So will your poverty come like a robber or one who travels [with slowly but surely approaching steps] and your want like an armed man [making you helpless].
Let’s take this as an example of how poverty comes, the bible clearly describes how a man can be reduced to poverty and it says these words:
It comes with a little sleep, let me sleep today I
will go to the field tomorrow, let me rest today I will do that tomorrow. When you are busy resting the grass or weeds are busy growing in your field. A little folding of hands, a little slumber, a little sleep brings poverty. That is the decline of a man into poverty and regarding this subject of prayer we will see that the allure of sleep is another influence which distracts the believer from the hunger for prayer. Those are the steps down to poverty and some have adopted a similar path of degradation, when it comes to prayer. I know that life has become busy for some of us; we go to work and come home tired and have the added responsibility of ministering the gospel. Often, we pray in preparation for a sermon only on the Saturday night preceding a church service on a Sunday morning, because we are too busy with leisure or sleep. In desperation, some have even spent restless hours searching online for a pre-recorded sermon . Let us now consider the stages that one takes down into a prayerless praying life.
We were all once praying believers . Although many people aspire to an active prayer life, we may become overwhelmed with daily life and over time, our commitment to prayer wanes. Today we pray tomorrow we do not pray. The time for prayer is time for prayer and not time for other things; cell phone on my knees and prayer on my knees does not work, only one thing can be on my knees but not both.