It was the great revivalist preacher Leonard Ravenhill who said, “If weak in prayer, we are weak everywhere.”  This is not an overstatement or an exaggeration of the truth.  One of the most basic elements of our Christianity is prayer.  It perforates every fiber of our being and if we are not praying it will affect every area of our lives.
      You can determine your entire spiritual health on the single element of prayer.  Rev. Ravenhill also said, “A sinning man stops praying, a praying man stops sinning.”  If you can have the fortitude to look back over your life and honestly evaluate yourself, you will find that the times where you struggled the most with sin were the times when you prayed the least.  There is power in prayer.  It is the fuel the feeds our spiritual lives.
      In teaching His disciples to pray Jesus said, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). Prayer is not a once a week event at altar time at church.  Altar time at church is for the lost and special needs, not for the saints to try and fill up for the week.  When Jesus provided manna (a bread like sustenance) for the Israelites in the wilderness, they could only collect what they would eat that day.  Any leftovers would spoil over night.  The Israelites had to get their bread daily.
      I think some of us want our prayers to be like AT&T’s rollover minutes.  The minutes you do not use during that month go into a bank that can be used when you go over your allotted minutes.  Prayer does not work that way.  You don’t have a bank of stored up minutes that you use when you are running low.  You must daily have that interaction with God.
      This is not a great revelation but yet so few people apply and practice this in their lives.  The reason is because prayer is not easy.  It should be easy and it can be easy but to have a daily walk with God in prayer is not as simple as it sounds.  Prayer is tough and it is usually only relied on during the tough times of our lives.  That’s not the way God designed prayer to be.  It all boils down to this, prayer is a choice.  You choose to do it just like you would choose to go exercise your body and the longer you make that choice the easier it becomes.  What is your choice today?  Do you choose prayer?