And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. (Matthew 26:40-41)

Another reason for our struggles in prayer is the physical struggle. Do you find yourself getting sleepy whenever you go to pray? I know people who use prayer as a cure for insomnia. They insist that it is better than Sominex and Nytol. Whenever they can’t sleep, they go to praying and the next thing they know they’re fast asleep. 

During His agony in Gethsemane, Christ asked His disciples to “watch and pray” with Him. Afterward, He went deeper into the garden and prayed up a bloody sweat. When He returned to His disciples—Peter, James and John—He found them sleeping rather than praying. 

After rebuking His disciples for falling asleep and failing to pray, our Lord admitted that “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” In other words, Christ’s disciples were more than willing in their spirits to do what He had asked them to do, namely, “watch and pray” with Him. It was their “flesh,” however, that was “weak” and uncooperative. Although the disciples’ willing spirits were more than ready to watch and pray with Christ, their fatigued fallen bodies kept rocking them to sleep.

Our reborn spirits are always ready and willing to do what our Lord wants us to do, but our fallen bodies are weak and uncooperative. This struggle between the physical and spiritual is probably never more easily detected or more evidently pronounced than in our prayer closets. Here, we often find our heavy hearts overridden by heavy eyes. Though we spiritually desire to rise up in fervent prayer, we discover ourselves nodding off due to physical fatigue. 

“And talking of sleepiness, I entirely agree with you that no one in his senses, if he has any power of ordering his own day, would reserve his chief prayers for bedtime—obviously the worst possible hour for any action which needs concentration. My own plan, when hard-pressed, is to seize any time and place, however unsuitable, in preference to the last waking moment. On a day of traveling—with, perhaps, some ghastly meeting at the end of it—I'd rather pray sitting in a crowded train than put it off till midnight when one reaches a hotel bedroom with aching head and dry throat and one's mind partly in a stupor and partly in a whirl.” (C. S. Lewis in Letters to Malcom)