All-Night Prayers, Why Bother?

To many, all-night prayers are hard, tiresome and not so important programs. Many Christians struggle to pray that long, mostly because they don’t appreciate the need for such sacrifice. As such, all-night prayers are sometimes the most poorly attended church programs.

However, this shouldn’t be so. We ought to do all-night prayers often and I will show you why.

First, let’s consider Jesus, our perfect model for prayer, who often prayed for extended periods including having all-night prayers. Luke 6:12 says, “And it came to pass in those days that He (Jesus) went out to a mountain to pray and continued all night in prayer to God.” This should challenge us to do all-night prayers especially when, like Jesus, we are faced with major decisions and we seek divine guidance. Surely, we can’t know better than Jesus and we can’t be more spiritual than Him to the extent of saying we don’t need to pray all-night.

Secondly, we got many things to address in prayer and we, therefore, need to spend more time in prayer. Yes, we may never fully exhaust all our prayer points in a single session of prayer, but all-night prayers give us opportunity to at least deal with most issues concerning us in prayer to our Father. I believe quantity of time is crucial in prayer. This is why Jesus rebuked his disciples for failing to watch with Him for at least an hour as He was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane (see Matt 26:40).

Thirdly, the extra sacrifice we make praying all night certainly moves the heart of God. God values sacrifice and when He see us go an extra mile in serving Him, He has no choice but to release a blessing upon us. It takes real sacrifice to pray all night as our flesh will be weak and sleepy. Among other things, when we do all-night prayers, we show God that we are committed to Him and that we have placed our trust in Him. It also shows God how bad we desire something that we let go our comfort and cry all night before Him.

Finally, we must realize that there is intense spiritual activity which happens at night whilst we are sleeping. Many people are bewitched at night. Satan and his agents attack us at a time when we are the most vulnerable and that is usually in our sleep. Jesus said that night is the time when the enemy comes to sow tares (Matthew 13:25). As such, when we pray all night, we are bound to receive our greatest victories there.

I will give two examples here. First, in Acts 12, Herod bound Peter and threw him in prison planning to kill him laterwards but the church hosted an all-night prayer seeking God’s intervention and God miraculously released Peter from the prison using the ministry of an angel. The second example is found in Acts 16, where Paul and Silas who were also imprisoned conducted a night prayer session and at midnight, as they were worshipping, God intervened with an unusual earthquake which flew open the prison doors leading to their release.

I call you to a life of doing all-night prayer sessions as often as you can.

Farayi Muzari