Why the night is assigned time
Many believers pray when they can. That is already something. But Scripture suggests something else: that certain hours are assigned, and that a prayer set at its hour does not work the way a prayer set at random does.
This is not a mystical idea of my own invention. It is a structure that runs through the Bible, and once you have seen it, you start seeing it everywhere.
Chronos and kairos
The twenty-four hours of a day are chronos: measured time, the time of the clock, the sun and the moon. It passes the same way for everyone.
But inside chronos, Scripture marks out moments of another nature — kairos: appointed times, hours when heaven leans in. Kairos is born when eternity enters measured time.
Eight such moments mark out a full day: four during the night — six in the evening, nine, midnight and three in the morning — and four during the day — six, nine, noon and three in the afternoon. Three hours each. These are the eight watches.
The watchmen do not stay
What struck me most, studying this subject, is that there is a changing of the guard.
Jacob saw it: "A ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it." (Genesis 28 : 12) Those ascending had finished their duty; those descending were taking the next watch.
Daniel uses the proper word: "The king saw a watcher and an holy one coming down from heaven." (Daniel 4 : 23) Those who watch — the Watchers. Each has an hour and a brief. An angel assigned to the first watch is not authorised to stay through the second.
And Bethesda says the same thing another way: "An angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water." (John 5 : 4) Not permanently. At moments. Whoever was not there at that moment received nothing — not because God loved them less, but because they had missed the hour.
What this says about our prayers
Revelation 9 : 15 is the verse that finally convinced me: "And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year." There is, then, a fixed hour at which certain powers are released upon the earth.
If that is true in one direction, it is true in the other. There are hours when heaven comes down, and hours when darkness stirs. The believer who sleeps through the one and prays through the other fights out of step all his life, without understanding why he is so tired for so little fruit.
That is why Scripture praises the sons of Issachar: they "had understanding of the times" (1 Chronicles 12 : 32). Not the strongest. The wisest about time.
Three hours I recommend learning first
This is not about praying eight times a day. Nobody keeps that rhythm, and nobody is asked to. It is about knowing what is at stake at each hour, and choosing one.
Six in the evening — the beginning of the watches. This is the hour of communion and consecration. "Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord: lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children." (Lamentations 2 : 19) If you keep only one, keep that one: it covers the night that is coming and commits the children.
Midnight — the hour of the fight. This is the hour of Paul and Silas, the hour when the foundations of the prison were shaken. It is an hour of war, and it requires being genuinely awake, not half awake.
Three in the afternoon — the hour of the sacrifice and of opened doors. This is the hour when Jesus yielded up the ghost and the veil was rent (Matthew 27 : 50-51). It is the hour when fire fell on Elijah's offering (1 Kings 18 : 36-38), the hour when Peter and John went up to the temple, the hour when Cornelius was praying and the angel appeared to him. The veil is torn: we go in.
My hour is midnight
I do not keep the eight watches. I keep the midnight one, and I have kept it for years.
It is the hour of the real fight. For a man of God, spiritual warfare is the greatest challenge of the ministry — not the preaching, not the organising, not even the tiredness: the fight. And I have had to withstand a great many attacks because of that hour.
I do not say this as a performance. I say it as a matter of experience: it is that prayer, kept daily at midnight, that keeps my ministry standing against the enemy's attacks, seen and unseen. The seasons when I let it go, I knew it — not by reasoning, but because things began to weigh.
If you must choose one, I will not necessarily tell you to choose midnight: it is a demanding hour, and badly prepared it wears you down. But I will tell you to choose, and to keep that choice long enough to see the fruit of it.
Two cautions
Do not turn the hour into a superstition. God is not a prisoner of a clock, and he hears the sick man's prayer at two in the morning as he hears the watchman's at midnight. Knowing the watches is not a secret code that obliges heaven: it is an understanding of time that aligns us with what God is already doing.
Do not destroy your sleep. I have seen people fall ill from badly managed watches and end up abandoning prayer altogether. Begin with one watch, once a week. Keep it for three months. That is infinitely more fruitful than eight watches kept for a fortnight and then dropped.
“Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation.”Matthew 26 : 41
To watch, on the Lord's lips, is not a synonym for praying more. It is being awake at the right moment.
This text takes up the teaching developed in the book "The 8 Prayer Watches — The Secrets of the 24 Hours for Spiritual Warfare", available in the shop.
Scripture quoted from the King James Version.