I enjoyed your article and as it turns out it is right down the alley of what I’ve been teaching in my mid-week Bible study. I think asking the question about prayer is complicated by a perception of prayer that strays from the biblical examples. Specifically, when we consider prayer, we think of saying grace, the sinner’s prayer, opening or closing a time or worship or Bible study or gathering at church to run through the list of prayer requests. The average time for these prayers are 10 to 20 seconds, maybe 30 to 40 seconds if you are long winded. Have you ever sat down at the table, been asked to bless the food and prayed for just two minutes? I have for an experiment. The first complaints started at 15 seconds into the prayer and shortly after 1 minute, some people started eating before saying "Amen."

Contrast this with Jesus’ prayer life. He went to lonely places and prayed all night or all day. Paul and Silas pray and sang all night in jail while other Christians nearby prayed all night for their release. Other examples include fasting a praying. For a fast to be “a fast,” you would normally think of it for longer than a few minutes or a few hours. Therefore, if prayer is concurent with the fast as implied, you would expect the prayer to last at least hours.

I think there is a substantial and affectual difference between the biblical idea of the discipline of pray and what we are used to. Could it be that people’s unwillingness to sing a song for three minutes correlates to peoples unwillingness to spend three minutes praying for a friend, salvation or their food? Whatever the reason people don’t sing or tarry in prayer, I am choosing to conform my prayer life to the biblical pattern. It’s not easy but as the saying goes “If you want do to the things Jesus did, you’ve got to do the things that Jesus did.”

Blessings,