Actress, author and Bible teacher Priscilla Shirer wants believers to stop treating prayer as the warm-up before the real work begins.
“Prayer is not a lead-up to the main thing. It is the main thing,” she said.
Shirer connected prayer with humility. Her challenge wasn’t simply to squeeze another spiritual habit onto a crowded calendar, but to recognize what skipping prayer can reveal about our dependence on God.
She drew on 2 Chronicles 7:14, linking the call to humble ourselves with the call to pray. In its original setting, the passage records God’s words to Solomon after the completion of the temple, calling His people to seek Him and turn from their wicked ways.
Shirer applied that connection to the tendency to put prayer behind everything else. When she lets it become secondary in her own life, calendar or schedule, she said, she acts as though she can manage without God’s help.
“Priscilla, you think you’ve got it on your own,” she said, describing the attitude she confronts in herself. She followed that thought with examples of circumstances, encounters and difficulties someone might try to handle alone.
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That self-examination keeps her message from becoming a finger-pointing exercise. Rather than describing prayerlessness as someone else’s problem, she put her own name into the challenge and asked what her priorities communicate.
For Shirer, humility brings a different response: bowing before the Lord and acknowledging the need for His help. She offered examples of prayers for a relationship in need of repair and for children or grandchildren drifting away from God’s truth.
Those examples weren’t announcements about her own family. They illustrated the burdens people can bring to God instead of assuming they must carry them alone.
The ministry’s accompanying caption echoed that invitation, asking followers to consider what they are trying to handle that God is asking them to surrender. The post presents prayer as dependence on Him, not a preliminary task to finish before moving on.
The emphasis fits Shirer’s wider teaching. Through Going Beyond Ministries, she equips believers with Bible studies, books and conferences, including her prayer-focused book Fervent: A Woman’s Battle Plan for Serious, Specific and Strategic Prayer.
In an earlier interview with CBN about that book, Shirer urged readers to approach prayer thoughtfully and incorporate God’s promises. She also addressed the temptation to hurry through devotional time just to check it off a list.
“He has shown me that taking the time to do it is not a waste of time,” she said. She described prayer as an opportunity for God to change the person praying, not only the circumstances or other people they bring before Him.
For families, that distinction makes room to pause before another attempt to fix everything. Philippians 4:6–7 directs believers to bring their requests to God with thanksgiving and points them toward His peace.
Shirer’s reminder is simple: prayer deserves more than the leftover minutes. Admitting we need the Lord is not an interruption to the work of faith; it belongs at its center.
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