Necessity is more than important. Necessity means not optional; it means essential. The things in your life that you treat as essential are fairly easy to point out. They are the things that you always get done however inconvenient the task or how weary the body.

For something you deem essential you will skip a meal, stay late at work, postpone an engagement, change a flight, rearrange your schedule, send regrets, or decline an invitation! The essential things are those things that, in your mind, you are convinced you cannot afford NOT to do.

According to Jesus, prayer is one of those “can’t afford to leave undone” things that should be on our list of essentials! In the first reading, Joshua engages the enemy in battle and sees his efforts prevailing only when Moses’ arms are raised in prayer. As soon as Moses lowers his arms, Joshua and his army begin to lose their advantage and the battle!

If we take Jesus at his word that he is the vine and we are the branches and that “… apart from me you can do nothing (John 15:5)," then we will know that prayer is a must. The struggles and challenges we face in life will be bigger than we can handle alone. Keeping the commandments will, on any given day, prove too much for us.

So, when we make prayer optional, we make ourselves vulnerable to the “tactics of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11). When we treat prayer as essential, we experience the same assurance given to God’s people of old: “Do not fear or lose heart… for the battle is not yours, it is the Lord’s (2 Chronicles 20:15)."