A sermon for Dalkeith Road Church of Christ 22/8/21
In this message I plan to continue with the theme of prayer that I have been speaking about in the last couple of messages. This time I want to discuss the idea of perseverance in prayer. Many of us have been praying for particular people for many years without having received the answer we desire. We pray for the salvation of our loved ones: our families and our friends. There is a longing in many us to see our children, our parents, our siblings, our spouses or our good friends saved. There is a longing to see growth in the church and godliness in our country. The journey of prayer for people is often a long one. Today I aim to bring some encouragement to those who are have been praying for a very long time.
There are some kinds of prayers that the Bible says God will definitely answer with a no. James explains that the wrong kind of prayer receives no positive answer. “You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (James 4:2-3). When James speaks here about the failure to receive answers to prayer, the first reason is a lack of prayer and the second is the attitude of greed and self-seeking. If Christians persist in cynical, lazy or self-seeking prayer, then it is no surprise to anyone that God does not provide an answer.
There are times when God says No to our requests, as in the case of Paul praying about his thorn in the flesh. Paul was afflicted with something in order to keep him humble. He asked the Lord three times for the thorn in the flesh to be removed (2 Cor 12:7-8). “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’” (2 Cor. 12:9 ESV). The answer to Paul’s prayer in this case was a definite No. Paul did not pray out of selfishness or greed. Yet, God had a particular purpose for Paul in answering no to his request. Sometimes this is what we experience when we pray, that God is teaching us to rest in his grace rather than having what we desire.
But there is another category of prayer, in which answers to prayer are delayed. We pray and pray, sometimes for years, and yet do not receive an answer. When the answer to prayer is delayed this is not the same thing as a no answer. It may seem that God is ignoring our prayers for our loved ones, but it is certainly not the case. God never ignores the prayers of his people. Reading the New Testament, we find a large number of promises regarding prayer. Here are a few:
“For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil” (1 Pet. 3:12 ESV).
“Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8 ESV).
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7 ESV)
“Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven” (Matt. 18:19 ESV)
“And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith” (Matt. 21:22 ESV).
The Bible contains many more promises about prayer, too many to include here.
As an encouragement to continued prayer for those you love, for the church and for our country, I want to look at one particular parable of Jesus, found in Luke’s Gospel chapter 11, verses 5 to 10.
And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, 6 for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; 7 and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? 8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. 9 And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. (Luke 11:5-10 ESV).
In the Ancient Near East, hospitality was extremely important. It was a duty, and shirking that duty would have been the cause of embarrassment at minimum, more likely shame. People did not have pantries stocked with food or bread in the freezer. It had to be baked daily. So when the man in the story had an unannounced guest turn up late at night, he was unable to provide the culturally necessary hospitality because he had run out of bread. In his desperation to solve the problem he knocked on the door of his friend. The friend did not want to get up and get bread because it was inconvenient and would disturb his sleeping family. However, these would have been considered minor inconveniences in light of the need to be hospitable. So the friend got up and gave the man what he needed.
Jesus asked a question in this parable. What friend would not help you with this kind of problem? The implication is that any half-decent friend would help. But even if that friend was not half-decent, he would still help the man who kept on banging on the door in the middle of the night, just to shut him up. Verse 8 reads, “I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs.” What the ESV calls “impudence”, the KJV translates as “importunity”, which means “persistence, especially to the point of annoyance”, and the NIV renders this word as “shameless audacity”. The man in the story was not prepared to go away from his friend’s house empty-handed because he was not prepared to fail in his duty as a host. So he did not give up asking until the friend got out of bed and gave him what he asked for.
The takeaway from this story is that if friends will give you what you need, either out of friendship or because you keep on pestering them until they give you what you ask for, how much more will God answer the prayers of his people. God is far better than any friend. He is more faithful to his word, and more generous, and fully good. This story is followed, then, by the exhortation to ask, seek and knock. God will answer when we ask him for what we need. Sometimes that involves repeated asking, seeking and knocking. In the case of praying for our loved ones, we will need to persevere and not give up.
Last time I was here I told the story of praying for my friend’s mother’s house to sell and it did so in just a few days. I have a different story about a house today. Last year one of our daughters was trying to buy a house in NSW. We all know that this is a very expensive exercise. She is single and therefore had a very tight budget for the house. The predictions regarding the covid housing market were that prices would go down, but in reality, the demand for houses just went up. At one home open there were eighty people looking to buy the house. Our daughter could not possibly compete in a bidding war. So I prayed that she would find a decent house in a location she liked that no one else was interested in buying. She purchased a house in the lower Blue Mountains near the end of last year. For that house there were only two other people interested but there was no great bidding war.
Praying about houses is one thing, but people are not always this simple. People can make choices and God must work to change their hard hearts. I believe this is one reason why it requires a lot of prayer to see the salvation of your loved ones or to see transformation in the country or growth in the church. You probably know that Ros Watt and I were friends in high school. I got saved at the end of high school, just before I went to university. But Ros told me that she had been praying for me for five years, basically the whole time she had known me up to that point. It took a long time to change my heart so that I would believe in Jesus as Lord and Saviour. It may be that you have been praying for five years or fifty years. Do not give up praying for God to change the heart of the person you are praying for. There is yet hope.
Prayer for people must be sustained and persistent. Epaphras understood this and continually wrestled in prayer for the church. “Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God” (Col. 4:12 ESV). The word translated here as struggling is translated in other versions as wrestling or striving. It was a word used of athletes in competition. Athletes know that if you want to succeed in your chosen sport, there is a lot of hard work ahead. No athlete wins an Olympic medal by giving up training after a few weeks, a few months or even a few years. They keep at it day after day and year after year, working towards the goal. Those who persist in prayer are like the athlete. They keep going until the reach the goal.
We may not all be intercessors, but we can understand that prayer for people takes time and persistence. Those who fight a war do not generally give up after a few battles just because the war is not yet won. On the contrary, they keep on fighting, even though that may take years of hard work and sacrifice. Prayer for our loved ones is similar. The people for whom we pray are not inanimate objects like houses, but humans who not only have a will but are subject to the spiritual forces that we cannot see. The wicked spiritual forces do not want to have your loved ones open their eyes to the truth. Prayer is thus part of the battle for the souls of people. We will not succeed in seeing our loved ones saved and transformed by giving up the fight in prayer. Let’s not give up on the battle just because it takes a long time. Keep going, keep praying, keep seeking, asking, knocking, because God promises to answer his people.
Be assured that our Father in Heaven does not ignore our prayers when we come to him in the name of Jesus. God’s promises are true and he is faithful to his word. Jesus knows the truth of God’s word and the faithfulness of the Father. The ultimate proof of this is that God raised Jesus from the dead. Despite the agony and apparent abandonment of the cross, God had not failed in his promises to his Son. God raised him from the dead and has declared to everyone that Jesus Christ is the Son of God (Rom 1:4). The resurrection proves the faithfulness of God to his promises. Not just the faithfulness of God’s promises to Jesus but his faithfulness to every promise he has ever made. If that is the case, then his promise to hear us when we come to him through Jesus Christ and his righteousness is not void. God is good and keeps his promises. For this reason, we should not give up praying.