How to Pray without Ceasing in 2025

 By: Rebekah Hargraves

Photo Courtesy of: Ben White

"Pray without ceasing." ~1 Thessalonians 5:17

I don't know about you, but I was once quite stumped over how exactly I was supposed to go about obeying this verse. After all, I'm a busy woman with responsibilities as a wife, homeschool mom, homemaker, business owner, volunteer at my church, hobby farmer, and ministry leader. How was I to "pray without ceasing"?

Everything changed for me when I realized that I had been viewing prayer all wrong. I had been viewing it as something I "had" to do, not something I "get" to do. I believed it to be an activity that always had to be done while sitting in a chair, quietly and undisturbed. I thought I could be haphazard about it and somehow just "fit it in". Not one of these assumptions was true, though.

How to Pray Without Ceasing:

1) Remember your need.

This is a point our pastor made in a sermon on prayer, and it opened my eyes and changed my perspective all at the same time. He pointed out that until you understand your deep need for the Lord, you will find prayer to be a challenging spiritual discipline to remain consistent in. But the moment you understand and remember how much you need the Lord, how much your children need the Lord, how much your community needs the Lord, how much your nation needs the Lord, and so on and so forth, is the moment you will find prayer to be a necessary lifeline and something you can't get enough of. 

Remember your need, and praying without ceasing will be so much easier.

2) Reframe what you think of as prayer.

Don't worry, I'm not about to get heretical or anything! I still know and believe that prayer is communication with God. What I want you to reframe is your thoughts on what your prayer time should look like. For a long time, I mistakenly believed that the only prayer time that "counted" was prayer time where I was sitting in a chair for extended periods, quiet and uninterrupted. 

But this simply is not the case! 

Because prayer is communicating with God, it isn't meant to be a business meeting of sorts where you sit for the prescribed amount of time and then you're done and you go about your day. Instead, prayer is meant to be an activity of intimacy and relationship. And this means that it is something you engage in all throughout the day - while you are doing the dishes and something is weighing heavy on your heart, while the kids are fighting and you are in desperate need of wisdom for how to address it, when a friend calls and asks you for advice, etc. All throughout the day, you can be in prayer.

That is how we pray without ceasing. 

3) Make a plan.

Lastly, we make a plan. I have heard it said that failing to plan is planning to fail. I could not agree more! 

If you are wanting to intentionally add more prayer time into your daily schedule, put a plan in place for how you are going to do that. Are you going to get up early and have that solo time in the chair? Are you going to get into the habit of offering up little prayers here and there all throughout the day? Are you going to jot down requests in a prayer journal so you don't forget what you were meaning to pray for?

Make a plan, and you will find it a lot easier to pray without ceasing! 

Reflection Questions:

1) Has this verse and what it means ever confused you?

2) What stood out to you about what you read today?

3) What steps do you need to take to make it more likely for you to "pray without ceasing"?