08/22/2026
WHEN THE PRESSURE HITS, WHERE DO YOU RUN FIRST?
We treat prayer like a last resort. God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there’s nothing else we can do, and God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.
Pressure reveals where our dependence really lies. The circumstances that squeeze us also expose what we actually lean on.
Some of us run to worry. Some of us run to a friend, a mom, or a dad. Some of us run to our phones, to ChatGPT or Google. Some of us start fixing, scheming, and strategizing.
None of those things are necessarily immoral or wrong, but there’s a better question hiding underneath all of them: do we run to God?
Prayer says, God, this is bigger than me, but it isn’t bigger than You.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones once gave this advice: always respond to every impulse to pray. Our instinct usually runs the other way. Make the call, solve the problem, build the plan, then pray.
If prayer becomes our reflex, the pressure itself turns into the trigger that reminds us to pray. Prayer moves to the front of the line instead of the back.
Opposition drove the believers in Acts 4:24 toward God, and it drove them there together. They prayed as one group, so the question lands on us too: when the pressure increases, where do we run first?
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