The Agpeya prayers are arranged at certain hours of the day, so should a Christian adhere to a certain time for prayer?

The incarnation of the Word of God, the Creator of time, and His participation in our temporal life, grants us the opportunity to unite with Him in the heavenly places (Eph. 2:6); but at the same time, to sanctify our earthly life, and time itself. Thus, the believer finds no duality dividing heavenly life from existence on earth, which is subject to time. Through his union with the Lord Christ, he obtains the right to enter the realm of heaven without despising time. There are people who — in their preaching about spirituality — attack every rite of worship and Church arrangement, apparently on the basis that the human being has completely cast off the flesh, or completely left the earth, and the believer is therefore no

114 St. Athanasius of Alexandria, The life of Antony and the letter to Marcellinus , trans., Robert C. Gregg (Paulist Press, 1979) Letter to Marcellinus 11, 12, 15: pp. 109, 111, 114.

longer subject to time or structure. Thus, liberty becomes a justification for disarray under the guise of spirituality. But our Orthodoxy reconciles the heavenly dimension of human nature with the temporal earthly dimension in the person of the heavenly Christ who bore our nature and lived in our world. For this reason, while we seek continuous prayer without ceasing at a heavenly or angelic level, we do not ignore our reality in this world. Thus, we observe the prayers that the Church has set for us at certain hours, for they support and preserve us in Christ Jesus our Lord throughout our daily lives.

Concerning this, St. Jerome says, “Although the apostle bids us to pray without ceasing (1 Thess. 5:17), and although to the saints their very sleep is a supplication, we ought to have fixed hours of prayer, that if we are detained by work, the time may remind us of our duty. Prayers, as everyone knows, ought to be said at the third, sixth, and ninth hours; at dawn and at evening.”¹¹⁵ Therefore, the Church believes that canonical prayers are necessary, supporting and assisting the believer to practice continual prayer that never ceases.

God wanted the worship of His people in the Old Testament to be well-ordered and systematic; our own era of freedom certainly does not mean that we should live without order or system. St. Clement of Rome (30–100 A. D.) says, “These things therefore being manifest to us, and since we look into the depths of the divine knowledge, it behooves us to do all things in (their proper) order, which the Lord has commanded us to perform at stated times. He has enjoined offerings (to be presented) and service to be performed (to Him), and that not thoughtlessly or irregularly, but at the appointed times and hours. Where and by whom He desires these things to be done, He Himself has fixed by His own supreme will, in order that all things, being piously done according to His good pleasure, may be acceptable unto Him.”¹¹⁶

In the twenty-fifth chapter of his article “On Prayer,” Tertullian (second century) says, “Touching the time , however, the extrinsic observance of certain hours will not be unprofitable—those common hours, I mean, which mark the intervals of the day—the third, the sixth, the ninth — which we may find in the Scriptures to have been more solemn than the rest.”¹¹⁷