Roderick Rogers, Pastor at Surrender Church in Fordyce, serves on the Prayer & Spiritual Awakening Task Force at the Arkansas Baptist State Convention.
Human beings have certain basic needs. We must have food, water, air, and shelter to survive. If any one of these basic needs is not met, humans cannot survive according to www.nasa.gov. I have been told pretty much my whole life that I must have food, water and shelter in order to make it. I beg to differ a little on that.
There is one major thing that they didn’t tell me or teach me in school and that’s the need for each human to have Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. I see so many people with the list above that still commit suicide or lose their minds. Jesus explains to us that we need more than good food, shelter, and water in Matthew 4:1-4, “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungered. And when the tempter came to him, he said, ‘If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.’ But he answered and said, ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’”
See that’s the problem with society. The enemy wants to show us all the flashy things in life and try to convince us that that is all we need. Satan wants us to think that all we need is food, clothing and shelter. He is a great deceiver. The Bible talks about him in John 10:10, “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy; I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”
You must have Jesus and a prayer life in order to have a good life. The enemy is only wanting to kill, steal, and destroy. Jesus wants to give us life and life more abundantly. That’s what leads me to the question: Is prayer a basic need for life? I say yes. We must pray to learn God’s ways. All humans need to learn how to love, forgive, seek God’s guidance and most importantly repent.
The farther our country has drifted away from prayer the worse it has become. You see more school shootings, gang activity, teenage pregnancies, drug abuse, higher dropout rates and the list goes on and on when we start putting prayer on the back burner in our society. This all proves that prayer is a necessity to human life. I want to end this article with what God’s Word says about how important prayer is to the human race. 2 Chronicles 7:14 states that “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” Prayer is the answer for the world today and forevermore.