Department of Biblical Mythbusting, Part I
Have you ever read those missionary biographies where the venerable subject of the account, male or female, is depicted as rising from their bed at 4 in the morning to spend an hour or three in prayer? Does it give you a fleeting sense of guilt, as you thump that ‘snooze’ button yet again, that you lack the same discipline and commitment?
This CHN department is about biblical mythbusting, and not character assassination, so we are not here going to cast aspersions on the spiritual reality behind the missionary's daily prayer habits. That blow would be too low, even for us. Neither will we raise the faintest whiff of a question about the accuracy of the recollection of his or her adoring son-in-law or daughter–the one who allegedly stumbled upon them in this time of prayer and stored it up for the writing of that fateful, guilt-inducing biography.
But there is a myth about the early morning prayer that deserves to be shot down in flames. The myth is the highly questionable notion that the earlier and more inconvenient the time of prayer, the more godly the person so inconvenienced. It's a myth occasionally bolstered by those who point to the example of the Lord Jesus, who would rise early in the morning (so we are told) to pray to his heavenly Father.
First, let's myth-bust the alleged example of Jesus. There is only one verse in the entire Bible—Mark 1:35—that suggests that Jesus rose early to pray. And there is no hint in this verse that this was anything more than a one-off response to the presence of a high-pressure crowd in need of some quick healings. Luke 5:16 has him withdrawing to desolate places to pray on more than one occasion, but makes no mention of time of day, just the ever-present crowds, who presumably would normally choose a more convenient time than 4 in the morning to herd together to find the Messiah. Matthew 14:23 also makes mention of crowds, but this time Jesus dismisses them and prays on into the evening.
In other words, if there is any precedent in what Jesus is doing, it's that if you have the capacity to heal people miraculously, you should take the occasional break at any time of day or night as you are able. During this time, you may pray. Where Jesus makes any explicit point about when we pray, he emphasizes not the time of day at all, but persistence (Luke 18:1). In other words, follow Jesus' example of praying whenever you get half a chance!
Second, in busting this time-of-day myth, we should at least allow ourselves to speculate as to the reasons why someone might rise early. Speaking personally, I was for years a sleep-in-when-you-get-the-chance kind of guy. Actually, it's quite possible that I still am, but with three small daughters I have no easy way of testing the theory. Then one day it struck me: if I got up early enough, I might be able to have an easy quiet passage into the morning school routine and even achieve some other necessary tasks around the house—one of which might be praying and Bible reading.
Having been beaten nearly senseless with this self-evident truth, I started to wonder about those stories of the early morning risers and pray-ers that I had heard over the years. Were they freaks like Margaret Thatcher or Bill Clinton who survived and even thrived on 3-4 hours sleep per night? Were they extraordinarily busy people? Were they, for example, rural doctors, with queues of patients waiting to see them as soon as they opened the door of their East African house at sunrise? Were their lives full of child-minding and household duties? Were they, like Jesus in the early days of his ministry, mobbed like rock stars whenever they showed their face in a built-up area? Did they suffer from depression-induced insomnia? Invariably, the answer to these questions came back “Yes, yes, yes, probably or yes?”—although not all explanations were true of all individuals. In other words, these early morning examples of godliness appeared to be doing what best suited their routine and circumstances.
“Not that there's anything wrong with that!” as Jerry Seinfeld would say. Let's not let the pendulum swing too far back the other way by suggesting that there is no discipline at all in the decision to pray early and regularly. Plenty of us wake early and instead, er, write letters to bored and longsuffering newspaper editors. But let's not kid ourselves that ‘earlier is better’ or ‘more spiritual’ just because a handful of unusual people in bizarro circumstances managed to get themselves written up by adoring family members.
Rather, let's look to the grace of God, the basis of all our prayer. It's God in his grace and by his Spirit who teaches us to call on the name of Christ. When we understand his grace, we will be able to do what Jesus actually said we should in Luke 18: we will “always pray”; we will ‘not lose heart’—even when we happen to have slept through that 4 am alarm.