At Any and Every Hour

At the height of His exhausting itinerant ministry, Jesus made a
habit of getting alone regularly to talk with God. Especially
after long days of healing and preaching, as Luke 5:16 points
out: “Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer” (NLT).

Resolved to receive God’s counsel amidst the endless
advice and suggestions of either His entourage or His enemies,
very often, He would slip away into the night as is described in
Luke 6:12: “One day soon afterward Jesus went up on a
mountain to pray, and he prayed to God all night” (NLT).
Upon returning from this and other late-night or early-
morning rendezvous with God, He would proceed to make
prophetic statements, controversial decisions, or delegate
unusual assignments to His disciples. After time alone with
God, Jesus would unflinchingly share God’s Word with others
—no matter the consequences.

Late-night, all-night, or all-day prayer was not only a
characteristic of Jesus’ time with the Father. In the eighteenth
century, the Moravian Church hosted a twenty-four-hours-a-
day prayer movement that began in the small village of
Herrnhut, Germany. Hours of unbroken prayer turned into days
and were sustained for one hundred years (1727–1827) by a
small community of three hundred men, women, and children.
Imagine—24/7 prayer for one hundred years! Did spending
unbroken time in conversation with God change them or the
world? It probably changed both. History records that
hundreds of missionaries were sent throughout the world
during the first thirty years of their one hundred years of