GEORGE MUELLER, the great Victorian Christian and social reformer, tells a story of persistent prayer in his diary:
In November 1844, I began to pray for the conversion of five individuals. I prayed every day without a single intermission, whether sick or in health, on the land, on the sea, and whatever the pressure of my engagements might be. Eighteen months elapsed before the first of the five was converted. I thanked God and prayed on for the others. Five years elapsed, and then the second was converted. I thanked God for the second, and prayed on for the other three. Day by day, I continued to pray for them, and six years passed before the third was converted. I thanked God for the three, and went on praying for the other two. These two remained unconverted.
1
Thirty-six years later he wrote that the other two, sons of one of Mueller’s friends, were still not converted. He wrote, “But I hope in God, I pray on, and look for the answer. They are not converted yet, but they will be.” 2 In 1897, fifty-two years after he began to pray daily, without interruption, for these two men, they were finally converted—but after he died! Mueller understood what Luke meant when he introduced a parable Jesus told about prayer, saying, “Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1).
It’s surprising to discover, given the importance Jesus attached to prayer, how little he actually said about how to pray. He gives no techniques, no methods to prayer, only a brief summary of what to pray about, the Lord’s Prayer, and an urging for us to doggedly keep at it, to hang in with it, to persist and insist in prayer. In Luke 18, he encourages us to copy a widow who badgers a corrupt judge into giving her justice. In Luke 11, the chapter containing the Lord’s Prayer, he tells another story of importunity, this time of a man banging away at his neighbor’s door in the middle of the night until the sleepy fellow gets up and gives him food. Then Jesus says of prayer, ” ‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened’ ” (Luke 11:9-10).
The sense of the Greek in each instance is to keep on keeping on; to repeatedly ask, seek, and knock.
Why persist?
Most of us, however, are not like Mueller or the widow. Products of a culture of instant gratification, we give up if we don’t see a fairly quick response to our prayers. But praying, like so many matters of the kingdom of God, is like farming. Imagine a farmer turning the soil, adding fertilizer, planting seeds, sprinkling a little water—then standing over the spot for a few hours, waiting for something to happen, and when no shoot comes up, walking away, shaking his head and saying, “Well, I guess that didn’t work.” Farmers know better. Crops take persistent cultivation and time to yield a harvest. Like good farming, good praying demands of us a quality of character Fried-rich Nietzsche called “a long obedience in the same direction.”
In the two parables on prayer I just alluded to, Jesus gives a very good reason why it is worth our while to persist in prayer. Remember how parables work—the Greek word is parabola, which means “to lay alongside.” Parables are stories, usually with one point, made either by comparison or contrast. In other words, Jesus explains a spiritual reality by taking a story from everyday life, laying it beside that truth, and then saying, in effect, “It’s like this,” or “it’s not like this at all.” In both parables on prayer, Jesus uses contrast. In the scory of the widow and the callous judge (Luke 18:1-8), Jesus is saying that even someone as bad as this judge can be pressured into doing the right thing. God isn’t a bit like that judge, so how much more can we expect him to answer our persistent prayers? It’s the same in the story of the man hammering away on his neighbor’s door in the middle of the night (Luke 11:5-8). God isn’t a bit like the sleepy neighbor who doesn’t want to get up to help his neighbor. So, how much more can we expect him to answer us when we come to him repeatedly with our requests?
We have a very good reason to persist in prayer.
My friend Pete Nelson is the best salesman I know. He simply will not be turned away. Once he called on a potential client who wanted nothing to do with him. The man cursed when he saw Pete walk in the door, and shouted, “Get out of here, you (multiple expletives deleted), and don’t let me ever see you walk through that front door again!” Pete went outside and analyzed what the man had said. He had said to never walk in the front door again. So my enterprising friend went around to the back of the business and walked in the back door. When the man saw him walk in, he exploded.
“Can’t you hear? I told you to get the (expletive deleted) out of here and never to come back again.”
“No, you didn’t,” Pete answered. “You said never to come in the front door again. I came in the back door.”
The man started to rebut, but he couldn’t help himself. He started to laugh, and then invited Pete into his office. Pete closed the deal soon afterward.
God is not like the client! He is not like that judge! He’s like a father—or rather, a good father is something like God.
“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:11-13, italics mine).
God is like a good father. Or like a good friend. Dr. Leslie Weatherhead liked to tell the story of an old Scot who was quite ill and near death. His pastor came to call on him one morning. When he entered the bedroom and sat down beside him, he noticed another chair opposite him, placed next to the other side of the bed.
The pastor remarked, “Well, Donald, I see I’m not your first visitor today.”
The old man looked puzzled and then smiled and said, “Oh, the chair. Years ago, I was having difficulty praying. I asked a friend for advice, and he suggested that I set a chair across from me when I pray, imagine God sitting in it, and talk to him as I would a good friend. It worked so well, that I’ve been doing it ever since.”
Later that afternoon, the pastor received a call from the man’s daughter. She was weeping. Between sobs she told him that her father had just died. The pastor went immediately back to the old man’s house. As he spoke with the daughter, she expressed her surprise that he had died so suddenly.
“He seemed to be doing so well, I decided to take a nap,” she said. “When I came back in the room he was gone. There is something I don’t understand: his hand was resting on that empty chair beside his bed. Isn’t that strange?”
The pastor said, “No, it’s not so strange. I understand.”
We have every reason to keep coming back, again and again, our whole lives, to pray to a God like that. However long he takes to answer, we know he cares, so much so that our prayers may influence what he does. That is the fundamental premise of Christian prayer, the chief reason Jesus assures us that it is worth our while to persist in it. That raises a question. Which is crazier: a widow pestering a callous judge for justice (a man who Jesus says has no fear of God or regard for man) or Christians, who have been given every assurance chat God cares deeply for them and the world, but who do not pester him for the very things he has promised to those who persist?
Infinite opportunist
For many, the notion of prayer as something that can actually affect the will of God is sheer nonsense. They reason: God knows all and is in control of all. He’s infinitely smarter than the brightest human being. It is therefore foolish for mere mortals to think that our desires could have any bearing on what he will do. Rousseau thought this way:
I bless God for his gifts, but I do not pray to him. Why should I ask him to change for me the course of things, to work miracles on my behalf? I who ought to love above all the order established by his wisdom and maintained by his providence.
3
In a similar vein, Immanuel Kant scorned the biblical view of prayer as primitive mythology, calling it a “superstitious illusion … for it is no more than a stated wish directed to a Being who needs no such information regarding the inner disposition of the wisher; therefore nothing is accomplished by it, and it discharges none of the duties to which, as commands of God we are obligated; hence God is not really served.”4
The god they speak of is not the living God of the Bible, the God Jesus said to come to repeatedly and importunately with our requests. The Bible is clear there is nothing we can do to change his ultimate will for our lives and for the world. The final outcome of history, that God’s name be hallowed and his kingdom come and will be done are fait accompli, fixed and sure, right now. But how God may choose to go about achieving his goals for us and others is open to change. His means are flexible. When it comes to the steps in the process he may use us to bring about his purpose. Theologian P. T. Forsyth called God an “infinite opportunist.” In prayer, God invites us to enter into partnership with him in the working out of his immutable will in our lives and the lives of others, giving us what Pascal called the “dignity of causality.”
In the mystery of the interaction between divine sovereignty and human freedom, there are some things God won’t do until we ask.
Holy resistance
The mystery goes deeper. P. T. Forsyth says that not only may persistent prayer change what God will do; it may, in a sense, take the form of actually resisting what his will is in a particular instance. To resist his will can actually be to do his will. What this means is chat in prayer we may sometimes resist what God wills only to be temporary and intermediary—and therefore to be transcended.
For example, I was born into a poor and relatively uneducated family. No one, on either side of my family, had ever gone to college. There were no books in my home when I was a child. That, I believe, was God’s will for me. But was it also his will that I passively accept that as my fate, my foreordained situation in life? Or was it his will that I resist that circumstance and find a way to go to college, to find books and delight in them? I think it was. His lower, initial will was to be resisted in favor of his higher, more ultimate will.
At any given moment in our lives, it may be God’s will that we face great pain and disappointment and loss. But it may also be his will that we resist his will in that moment, in favor of his higher and greater will. Sometimes we may beg and beg and hear him refuse, as he did Paul, and say, “My grace is enough. It’s all you need” (2 Cor. 12:9, paraphrase). But other times we may come away as did the blind man Bartimaeus, who would not take no for an answer, and finally got yes from Jesus (cf. Mark 10:46-52). Or it may be for us as it was with a Gentile woman from Syro-Phoenicia. She came to seek her daughter’s deliverance from a demon. What she initially got from Jesus was a stiff retort. Using a figure that Jews commonly used of Gentiles, an insult, he called both her and her people “dogs”: “First let the children eat all they want … for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”
That may have turned me away, but not her. She jumped right into the fray and jabbed back, saying, “Yes, Lord … but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Jesus loved it! He answered, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter” (Mark 7:24-30).
We may obey God as much when we push our case and plead our cause as we do when we accept his decision and say, “Yet not what I will, but what you will.” But don’t forget, Jesus said those words to his father after he had fallen to the ground and begged that it be otherwise, not before (Mark 14:32-46). How much have we missed in our lives simply because we were too frightened or too lazy or too theologically fastidious to press our case?
There’s a moving scene in the television adaptation of the drama The Miracle Worker. It’s the story of two remarkable women: a deaf and blind girl named Helen Keller, and Annie Sullivan, the person determined to teach Helen to be a human being. Helen’s brother James is trying to get Annie to give up on Helen as all the others have. But Annie won’t hear of it. She remembers too vividly the way her brother Jimmie had given up and died in a mental hospital. James presses her: “You don’t let go of things easily, do you?”
Annie: “No. That’s the original sin.”
James: “What?”
Annie: “Giving up. Jimmie gave up.”
James: “Perhaps Helen will teach you.”
Annie: “What?”
James: “That there is such a thing as defeat. And no hope.”
(Annie’s face sets.)
James: “And giving up. Sooner or later, we do. Then maybe you’ll have some pity on—all the Jimmies. And Helen, for being what she is. And even yourself.”
(Annie sits for a moment, and then gets up silently and turns and walks away from James. She paces for a few minutes in the semi-dark room and then walks over to the bed where Helen is sleeping. She drops to her knees at the bedside. The camera takes us up to their two faces: the sleeping child and the determined teacher.)
Annie: “No, I won’t let you be. No pity, I won’t have it. On either of us. If God didn’t mean you to have eyes, I do. We’re dead a long time. The world is not something to be missed: I know. And I won’t let you be till I show you it. Till I put it in your head.”5
The trouble with our prayer lives is that we cling to God only in our weakness, when he would have us cling to him also with our strength. We’re like Abraham who, planting himself in the Lord’s path down to Sodom, said, “Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you!” And then in language that points to Jesus’ parable on prayer in Luke 18, he says, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25, italics mine). Holy impertinence! When’s the last time you said something like that to God? Or have you ever prayed in the way Moses told Israel to love God? “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:4-5, italics mine).
We tend to want our prayers to be therapeutic, to leave us relaxed. More often than we wish, God would have them leave us stirred up. No wonder we get bored with prayer! No wonder we experience prayer in the same way director Billy Wilder said he experienced a film once. “The film started at 8 p.m. I looked at my watch at midnight and it was only 8:15.”6 What would happen to us if we really believed that we may affect the way God does his work, and that with holy impertinence we may actually resist him— with his blessing?
Perhaps you have seen the famous picture of the praying hands by the German painter and wood engraver Albrecht Durer. The two hands are lifted before God with their palms together. When the great Scottish preacher and theologian P. T. Forsyth first saw a photograph of the woodcut hanging in the home of a friend, he said he wished he could have attached to it a line from John Milton that described prayer as “the great two-handed engine at our door.” In Milton’s time, an engine was an instrument or machine of war, used in a siege to bring down walls. Prayer, the great two-handed engine—not hands folded in resignation or passivity, but hands folded that work may be done and mountains moved.
This form of persistence spills naturally into the whole concept of actually wrestling with God in prayer, which we will discuss further in the next chapter. It is always worth our while to persist in prayer, because of who God is—not an unjust judge or a sleepy neighbor, but our Father. He works on us by his grace, drawing us into prayer, and then allows us to work on him through our faith. It’s a marvelous arrangement.
Relationship, reputation, promises
What things may we persist for in prayer? Moses’ prayer after the golden calf debacle in Exodus 32 provides some exciting clues. God was very, very upset with Israel. After he had led them out of Egypt into freedom, they were trying out another god, in the form of a golden calf or bull. They couldn’t say they weren’t warned about that sort of thing. In the Ten Commandments, God had told them that he was as jealous for their undivided love as a husband was for his wife’s, and that he would not let that kind of sin go unpunished. They knew better, but they-went ahead and did it anyway. And now God wanted to destroy them. What followed was astounding. Moses persisted in prayer on their behalf, God relented, and Moses went on to gain quite a reputation as a man of prayer. Later, on more than one occasion, it would be only his prayers that saved the people from well-deserved extinction—he even told the Lord to destroy him, too, if he was going to destroy Israel.
For this, Moses is spoken of in Scripture as a man with whom God could speak face to face, as with a friend. Moses, the great man of prayer, persisted in prayer over three things: God’s self-chosen relationship to his people, his reputation in the world, and his promises.
It’s quite funny how God drew Moses into this kind of praying.
When God first told Moses of the people’s sin, he said, ” ‘Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt.’ ” Note that for God it was no longer my people, but Moses’ people who were sinning! Then he said, ” ‘Leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them.’ ” In other words, “Get out of my way, I’m going to wipe them out.” After seeing all God did to the Egyptians when he was angry, if I were Moses I would have tripped over myself to get out of his way. But Moses didn’t. He was upset with God’s “redefinition” of his relationship with his people. So he said, ” ‘O Lord … why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?’ ” (Ex. 32:7-11, italics mine).
Moses reminded God, “These are your people, Lord, don’t wipe them out! You’re the one who started the relationship; it was your idea, not ours. Don’t end it now.”
Next comes God’s reputation. Warming to his line of argument, Moses continued, ” ‘Why should the Egyptians say, “It was with evil intent that he (Yahweh) brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth”?’ ” (Ex. 32:12). That is a vivid Hebrew way of saying, “Think of your reputation, Lord. Spare your people and be glorified. Let the nations know that you are a faithful and merciful God!”
Then come God’s promises. Moses rested his case with these words: ” ‘Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever” ‘ ” (Ex. 32:13). In short, Moses invoked the Law of Noncontradiction and asked how God could both wipe the people out and keep his promises to the patriarchs to make of them a great nation. I like the way Luther described Moses’ prayer: He flung the sack of God’s promises at his feet, and he couldn’t step over them!
In his name
Jesus said we can ask of God anything we want and it will be given to us—as long as it is in his name. So, think of God’s self-chosen relationship to us. Think of God’s glory. Think of God’s promises. Then ask anything! Within those parameters is a universe of desires and delights that we may bring to God in prayer—and persist over. By them our own desires and delights are purified and refined.
Jesus was telling his disciples to pray this way when he said, “When you pray, say this: Our Father …” It’s all contained in that simple opening and in the phrases that follow—our relationship to him as Father, with all the promises that go with it, and an earnest desire for his glory. When we pray, we speak to one who is our Father, whose name is to be reverenced and whose kingdom we are to desire. The Heidelberg Catechism asks, “Why hath Christ commanded us to address God thus, ‘Our Father’?”7 Its answer is, “That immediately, in the very beginning of our prayer, he might excite in us a childlike reverence for, and confidence in, God, which are the foundation of our prayer.…” This is also the very foundation of persistent prayer.
Like Moses, we should persist in prayer within the context of these things. That is the way of the Psalms. Read them and note how brief the petitions are, but how extensive their meditations on God’s love and majesty are. They are model prayers: state briefly your desires, but dwell on who God is. Consciously connect what you are asking with his character, for “Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance,” writes Archbishop Trench, “it is laying hold of his highest willingness.”8
The first song I learned in church was “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so; Little ones to him belong, they are weak, but He is strong.” In 1949, when Mao Tse Tung declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the country was closed to missionaries, and all Western Christians were forced to leave the mainland. The church has had a very difficult time since. For years little was known about how it was doing. What news did leak out had to be discreet. One message did get out in 1972. It was brief, and to the Chinese authorities, innocuous. It said, “The This I Know People are well.” A vivid and powerful word to Christians, worldwide. That was who they were—the people loved by Jesus—and that has been how and why they have persisted in prayer over years of suppression and persecution.
Better than the request
What happens when we persist in prayer within this context? In the long term, we will see God’s good and perfect will done. Or we may see our prayers answered better than we prayed them. We pray for silver, Luther wrote, but God often gives us gold. Other wonderful things happen, too. Our prayers get kicked up a notch. We are expanded as we ask repeatedly in Christ’s name. In so doing we begin to see things more clearly, as we learn to see things through his eyes. Prayer then becomes what Emerson called “the contemplation of life from the highest point of view.”9
Persistent prayer over a long time can leave us feeling tired and helpless. That’s good! It can force us to confront our weakness and rely more on God’s strength.
Three ministers were discussing the relative values of the various postures of prayer as a telephone repairman worked on the telephone system. One pastor insisted that the folding of the hands was the key to good prayer. Another maintained that praying on one’s knees was the essential. The third recommended praying flat on one’s face as the most powerful prayer posture. The repairman couldn’t resist: “I have found the most powerful prayer I ever prayed was upside down, hanging by my heels from a power pole, forty feet above the ground.”
Most important, when we pray persistently we get to be with God. What happens to us while we pray is at least as important as the thing we pray for. The praying is often better than the thing asked. I chink that is the answer to the question that was often in my mind as a young man: Why does God wait so long to answer my prayers? Wouldn’t it be more efficient, even a greater sign of his love, to answer immediately? I’ve come to see that it is precisely his love that makes me wait and keep coming to him. He is more precious than anything I desire.
Aeronautics of persistent prayer
But it is hard to keep up this long obedience in the same direction. That’s why it is essential to hold on to the big picture, to keep the farmer’s perspective that the kingdom of God is a matter of sowing and reaping, and that between the two there is a wait.
In 1988 another pastor and I began to meet weekly to pray for revival in our churches and in the wider community of Irvine, California. We also agreed to hold monthly prayer meetings in our individual congregations to pray for the same thing. We started with a keen sense of anticipation. The church meetings were packed, and our individual meetings were stimulating. Even though he and I continued to experience a sense of God’s pleasure in our times together, soon attendance at the church meetings dwindled dramatically. After a year we both were called to other churches! We’ve often laughed that when we prayed for revival in our churches, God chose to move us out.
Maybe there’s something to that.
But what was clear as we prayed was that the people weren’t embracing the vision for spiritual awakening that we felt so keenly God had put in our hearts. The next four years spent in New Providence, New Jersey, saw a similar scenario develop.
I’ve been dean of the chapel at Hope College for five years now, and what we have seen is the very thing I prayed would happen in Irvine and in New Providence, but which has not happened there—yet. These past five years I’ve discovered there have been scores, even hundreds of people, who have prayed for a spiritual awakening for Hope College for decades. My staff and I are reaping where others have sown. I still pray for Irvine and New Providence, as do their current pastors and many others. I believe someone will one day reap in these places a spiritual harvest where others have sown.
Keeping a journal has helped me to persist. Keeping a record of God’s past faithfulness gives me the means to read about what I may have forgotten in the doldrums of waiting. I pray daily for my children. They’re great kids, and I couldn’t be more blessed or pleased with who they are. But I want it all for them; I want them to be “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). Sometimes I see results, most of the time I don’t.
One morning I was praying for my son, Dan, and I felt yon. My tendency is to scramble up the rocks of life’s canyons and just sit there and stew. But in persistent prayer, I can completely throw myself on God’s mercy and pray until God acts and I am borne aloft on his power. In the meantime, I am coming to know him better and my strength is renewed.
Basil Miller, George Mueller, Man of faith and Miracles (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1983), 145.
Quoted in Donald Bloesch, The Struggle of Prayer (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 73.
Quoted in Parables, Etc. (Saratoga, Calif.: Saratoga Press, Nov. 1982), 7.
Heidelberg Catechism, Question 120, 626.
Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson
