Each Saturday morning at eight o’clock, guys from our church gather to pray. Someone leads a short devotional that’s designed to prepare our hearts for prayer. Then, we spend the remainder of the hour crying out on behalf of the needy. We intercede for the lost, the drifting, the hurting, and missionaries miles away. Maybe your church does something similar.
I find that one of the highlights of our gathering is when a new believer eases in the door and takes his seat around the table. It’s often a person whose name we’ve lifted up to God in the past. When they take their turn to pray, it’s such a blessing to hear their tender prayers. There’s much to learn from the way a new believer speaks to God.
It was especially encouraging to me when my son, Zak, first attended our men’s prayer meeting a year or so ago. We had prayed for him for years, and finally, God mercifully saved him. Now he felt the responsibility to pray for others.
I hope you’ve experienced the joy that comes from seeing a loved one become a follower of Christ. But perhaps you are still in that waiting period. Maybe you’ve got someone—a child, a sibling, a spouse—you’ve brought to the Lord in prayer for years. There have been nights you’ve laid in bed crying out to God on their behalf. They’re on your mind often, and you pray, hoping that God will rescue them.
In what’s called “The Parable of the Persistent Widow,” Jesus opens with a statement that stirs me to keep praying for those I’m tempted to give up on. In Luke 18, Jesus told His disciples that He was going to tell them a parable to show them that “they should always pray and not give up.” Let’s stop right there. (You can read the rest of the passage at the end of this article.) We don’t need a Bible commentary to understand what Jesus is saying to His disciples and to you and me. It’s crystal clear, Jesus wants us to be a people who keep coming back to God with our prayers; He doesn’t want us to ever throw in the towel. I find immense hope in that simple message from Jesus: Pray and don’t give up.
J.C. Ryle commenting on this passage points out:
“Let us pray for all—the worst, the hardest, and the most unbelieving. Let us continue praying for them year after year, in spite of their continued unbelief. … The answer may not come for ten, fifteen, or twenty years. It may not come till we have exchanged prayer for praise and are far away from this world. But while we live, let us pray for others. It is the greatest kindness we can do to anyone, to speak [on their behalf] to our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Let’s be among those who are faithful to “always pray and never give up.” May we have the heart of the persistent widow “who kept coming” to the one person who could help her.
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”
And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:1-8, NIV)
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