Joyfulness and Persistence in Prayer

Welcome to this second session in my series on the topic of Prayer.

Last week I spoke about our heart attitudes to prayer and how they influence our prayer lives.

I'd like to start off this session by looking at why we pray, and what prayer accomplishes in the lives of believers.

First, prayer, in conjunction with reading our Bibles, is the way that we grow deeper and stronger in our relationship with the Father.

It is in answer to prayer that the Lord gives us wisdom and direction when we don't know what to do. It is in honest and earnest prayer that the Father is able to shine a light into the deep, dark places of our hearts where we try to keep sin hidden – and then He is able to bring it out into the light for us to repent and be forgiven. And it is in prayer that the eyes of our hearts are fully opened, through the Holy Spirit, to understand more of the wonderful truths and promises that we find in Scripture.

Secondly, prayer gives power to the work that we do for the Lord.

Whether we teach, or parent, or paint, or clean, or preach – whatever it is – we want to do our work heartily, as unto the Lord, with power and fruitfulness. But when we do our work in a kind of “autopilot mode”, without bringing it to the Lord, we often find that our work becomes tiresome and fruitless. However, when we decide to make our daily work a topic of prayer, bringing it to the Lord, and stop relying on our own strengths and abilities, we find that He gives us joy and strength for the tasks that He has called us to, and our work becomes more fruitful.

One Christian writer said, “All fruitfulness in service is the outcome of prayer.”

Thirdly, prayer is the means that God has given to us to intercede for others.

Intercession is praying on behalf of someone else. It literally comes from the words in Latin that mean “to stand in between”. Think about Moses in the Old Testament, when he stood between Father God and the children of Israel after they had worshipped the golden calf. Moses begs the Lord not to wipe the nation of Israel from the face of the earth, which was the punishment that was due to them. And we see that in response to his intercession, the Lord relents, and the people of Israel are saved.

It is in intercession that we can pray for the healing, protection, salvation, and anything else that others might need in the Lord.

One of my favourite stories about intercession is the life of Hudson Taylor. Hudson Taylor was a missionary to China in the 1800s, and through his tireless work millions of people came to salvation, and hundreds of people were influenced to become missionaries. But as a teenager and a young adult, Hudson Taylor's life was very different. He was such a worldly and skeptical young man that he was convinced that he was too far gone from God to ever be saved. He decided to get as much pleasure as he could from the things of this world, as he was sure he was never going to get into heaven anyway! What he hadn't counted on were the prayers of his parents. Hudson Taylor's parents had actually prayed for him to be a missionary to China since before he was born! One afternoon, as a young man, Hudson Taylor walked into his father's library looking for a book to read. He “just happened” to find a Gospel tract on his father's desk and he decided to read it because “it might have an interesting story in it”. What he didn't know was that 70 miles away, where his mother was visiting friends, she had felt a strong urge to pray for her son that afternoon. She locked herself in her bedroom, and promised the Lord that she wouldn't come out until her prayers for her son had been answered. That was the afternoon that Hudson Taylor gave his life to the Lord!

We must be careful to never underestimate the power and the value of our prayers on behalf of someone else.

Fourth, prayer is the prescription for receiving Christ's peace and for obtaining freedom from fear and anxiety.

It is in prayer that we can come to the Lord when we are weary and worn out, and it is in prayer that we can exchange our heavy burden for His, which He promises is light.

Lysa Terkeurst says: “Thinking about, talking about, and worrying about something is not the same as praying about it.”

It is when we take our burdens to the Lord in prayer that we find rest for our souls.

Next, prayer is one of the main ways that God has provided for us to enter into the abundance and joy that He has promised to His children.

If you were here last week, you'll remember that I spoke about the incredible gift and privilege we have of being able to pray in Jesus’ name. In John 16: 24 Jesus tells His disciples, “Until now you have not asked for anything in My name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.” Praying in Jesus' name means praying with the heart and mind of Jesus, and when we pray that way, our prayers will bring us joy.

Psalm 16: 11 says, “You make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy.”

Does anyone here want their joy to be filled to the fullest? I know I do! Do you want to have joy so deep down in your heart and so full to overflowing that it runs over into your words, and your actions, and your prayers? Well, the way to that joy is to get into the presence of God – to stop doing, and talking, and stop grasping for long enough to be still enough for Him to fill us up. Prayer is communing with the Father, and there is no greater joy than being in His presence.

The sixth thing I have on my list of what prayer accomplishes in the lives of believers is that prayer enables us to take a stand in the fight against the enemy.

In Ephesians 6, Paul lists all of the spiritual items of armor that the believer needs to put on in order to be able to withstand the attacks and schemes of the devil, and then in verse 18 he says, “after you've put on all of those things put on the weapon and protection of prayer.”

In “The Kneeling Christian” we read: “Do we realize that there is nothing the devil dreads so much as prayer? His great concern is to keep us from praying. He loves to see us up to our eyes in work – provided we do not pray. Satan laughs at our toiling, mocks at our wisdom, but trembles when we pray.”

There are more than six things that prayer accomplishes in our lives and more than six reasons why we pray, but for tonight I want to end with those six.

For the next part of tonight's teaching I want to look at some of the things that can hinder our prayers, or get in the way of our prayer lives.

The first thing that I believe that hinders our prayers is probably the most obvious, and that is sin.

I don't mean that if you sin and repent and ask for forgiveness and turn from your sin that your prayers won't be answered – and thank goodness for that because, none of us are perfect! But what I do believe is that if we are involved in repeated, deliberate, and habitual sin, that will hinder God from answering our prayers. 1 John 3: 22 says this: “Whatever we request we receive from Him because we keep His Commandments and do what pleases Him.” Simply put: we can't expect God to do what we want Him to do, when we don't do what He wants us to do.”

Please note two things here: this is not a call to legalism or perfectionism. We do not do and obey so that we can get – we obey so that our lives are pleasing in the sight of Father God, and lives that are pleasing in His sight our lives that will pray in accordance with His will and character, and that is the life that God desires to bless.

The second thing to note is that not all of our unanswered prayers are as a result of sin. All I want to point out is that we need to check if there is sin in our lives, and if that is the reason why our prayers are not being answered, then we need to deal with that issue.

The second thing that I believe gets in the way of our prayers being answered is that many believers are lazy about persistent prayer.

It's like our “prayer muscles” get tired if we have to pray over an extended period of time for the same thing, without the Lord answering. Or perhaps for some people it's actually a matter of wrong teaching: they think that the Lord already knows what they need, and so they only have to ask once, and then when He's ready, He'll answer. While it's true that God does know what we need and want before we even ask Him for it, He desires for us to bring our petitions before Him as many times as we want, because I believe that constant and persistent prayer shows God our heart attitude of seeking after Him rather than seeking just the things that He can give us. Persistent prayer shows a heart attitude that is submitted to seeking His will for our lives.

Many times in Scripture we are urged to pray consistently and persistently. One of my favorite verses about this is, “be joyful in hope, patient in trouble, and persistent in prayer.”

Again, I have two side notes about praying more than once for a thing. Sometimes we think we haven't heard from the Lord, when actually He has spoken – and we just don't like what He said, so we think we should ask again. Think again about Moses in the Old Testament, when he asked the Lord to please send somebody else to go and speak to Pharaoh. I'm paraphrasing here but the Lord basically said to him, “I'll send Aaron with you, but I've already said you're going, Moses!”

The second side note is that persistent prayer is not the same as babbling or endless repetition, which Jesus actually warns us against in our prayers. A simple example of what I mean by that is how any parent knows the difference between their child asking them for something and they child nagging or whining about getting something. Again it comes down to our heart attitude in our prayers, and we need to check what our heart attitude is when we continue asking the Lord for something.

I want to give you one more example of the benefit of persistent prayer before I move on. George Mueller committed himself to pray daily for two specific men he knew to come to salvation. Now George Mueller is famous for having his prayers miraculously answered. For example, one time he was praying for bread to feed the orphans in the orphanage that he ran because they literally had nothing for breakfast, and within minutes of him praying, a baker knocked on the door with loaves of bread to give away to the children! However, even for George Mueller prayers weren't always answered instantly. In the case of these two men he was praying for, he prayed for 60 years for them to come to salvation. One of the gentlemen was saved at George Mueller's last service that he preached before he died, and the other gentleman was saved within a year of Mueller's death.

So my encouragement to you is: unless God tells you to stop praying or unless the answer is already clear to you, don't stop praying, because the Lord has not stopped working.

The third caution I have regarding prayer is this: we can't pray effectively without spending adequate amounts of quantity and quality time reading the Scriptures. John Piper says it this way: “It is absolutely crucial for me that my prayer be saturated with the Word, and that my Bible reading be saturated with prayer.”

Why do I believe that there's such a strong connection between reading the scriptures and praying? Let me offer you two verses to help us answer this. First, in John 15: 7 Jesus tells His followers, “If you abide in Me (that's the communion that we have with Him in prayer) and My Words abide in you (that's the communion that we have with him when we read the Bible), you will ask what you desire and it will be done for you.” The second verse is this: Jeremiah 7: 9 says that, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. “Who can understand it?” This verse is key, not just in our prayer lives but in all of our lives as believers, for the very simple reason that our feelings about a situation are not always the truth.

A simple example: a man may develop very strong feelings for a female colleague at work. His heart may convince him that she, and not his wife, is his true soul mate, because she “gets him” in a way that his wife just doesn't. He may pray for the Lord's guidance in developing a relationship with this woman, and his heart may convince him that the Lord hears him and understands him, because the Lord wants his children to be happy and blessed. But this man's feelings are lying to him!

What he thinks of as praying for the situation is his heart finding ways to “defend the indefensible and rationalize the irrational”, as one commentator describes it. Have you ever done that? How many Christians have gone astray and wandered off track because they “felt” the Lord was leading them to do x y & z?

Now again, I ask you to hear me clearly: the Lord can certainly use what I will call “Holy Spirit feelings” to prompt us, or nudge us to do certain things or say certain things at certain times, but those feelings will always line up with the character and nature of God as revealed in His Word. To go back to the example: is God loving? Does He want us to be happy? Yes. Is there anything in His Word that would lead you to believe that He would condone unfaithfulness, adultery, deceit, and broken relationships? Well, no!

If our feelings are an answer to prayer, they will line up with Scripture.

I want to give you another example of how this sometimes plays out in my life … Almost without fail, in the months where our finances are strained and stretched, I will get a very strong feeling to give money away, to spend money on other people. I'll get an urge to make a meal for a family in our community, or I'll feel like I should give the car guard at the mall 50 Rand instead of my usual five Rand.

Please understand – I'm not bragging here! I do have a point. If I try to align that prompting with my natural feelings, I'll hold back – in fact, I'll hold on even tighter to my purse because I know I need that money to get me through the month. But if I allow the nudging of the Holy Spirit to line up with the Word of God that's inside me, I'll give, because I know that I serve a generous God, Who supplies all of my needs.

Again I want to give a bit of clarification here: I don't necessarily mean that when we pray for something, we then need to search the Scriptures to get an answer to that prayer (although there's definitely a time in a place for Christians to do that). I'm also not saying that God can't and doesn't speak to us in a variety of ways, and not only through Scripture. But what I am saying is that regular time reading and studying and meditating on the Word of God, writes His standards on our hearts, and I'm saying that His revealed Word in the Scriptures is our most objective way to know Him and to know His thoughts, and to know His direction for His people. And so, in prayer, God and His Word should inform our feelings and not the other way around.

My final question that I have about prayer for tonight is this: What do we do when God doesn't answer our prayers? Although I think that actually when most people ask this question, what they're really asking is: what do I do when God doesn't answer my prayers the way that I thought He would or thought He should. And if I'm honest, this is one of the hardest things to understand about prayer.

I understand that if I'm praying for things out of greed or selfish ambition, God will most likely say no to my requests. I understand that if I have unconfessed, habitual sin in my life, God will most likely and quite rightly not answer my prayers. I understand that if I pray in unbelief or in anger against somebody or I'm in unforgiveness, those things will get in the way of God's blessings. But when I've held up my life and my heart before the Lord, and I've asked Him to wash me clean of my iniquities and create in me a clean heart, and I've prayed sincerely and persistently, and in line with God's will and His Word, and I still don't receive the answers to my prayers – how do we understand that?

Let me be clear here again: I in no way intend to minimize anybody's pain, or disappointment, or sorrow that you might be feeling about unanswered prayer in your life. If you know me at all, you'll know that what I'm about to say is not just words, and it's not just Bible verses that I'm going to trot out in front of you to make you feel inadequate about the way you're feeling. What I know about God not answering prayer the way that I thought He should, is truth that I have fought for and won on some very hard and painful battlefields in my own life, and so hear my heart speaking to your heart tonight …

The truth is that God answers every single prayer of every single righteous believer;

The truth is that God answers prayer in three different ways: sometimes He says “yes”, sometimes He says “no”, and sometimes He says “wait”;

The truth is that sometimes “no” is a valid response to our requests;

The truth is that sometimes what feels like a “no” to us isn't a “no” in the kingdom of God;

The truth is that when the Father answers “no” or “wait”, it's because He loves us and He knows the best for us and the situation just as much as He does the times when He answers “yes”;

The truth is that sometimes, with maturity or hindsight, we will understand why He answered “no” or “wait”, but the truth is that sometimes we will never know why, and it will never make sense on the side of heaven, because He is God and I am NOT;

The truth is that God is the Rewarder of those who diligently seek Him;

The truth is that His ways are not our ways, His thoughts are not our thoughts, and we should thank God for that, because His thoughts are higher than our thoughts and His ways are higher and better and wiser than our ways.

I want to encourage you: don't let your unanswered prayers stop you from praying and trusting the Father. He is the God who does great and unsearchable things, “wonders without number”, Scripture calls it. We cannot discover the depths of God, or the limits of the Almighty, because He is love, and kindness, and strength, and hope without limits and without borders.

It's ok to feel disappointed when He closes a door, or sends us where we didn't plan to go, or when He rewards us with something other than what we asked for. But equally we need to ultimately hold on to truth and not feelings.

I went to close off this teaching with a Scripture from 1 Peter 1, and then I'll pray for us. “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith, of greater worth than gold which perishes even though refined by fire, may result in praise, glory, and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

Father, may we never underestimate or neglect the power that is available to us and through us when we pray. We thank You that You are the giver of good things, and that You are a God who hears and is moved by our prayers. May we be known throughout heaven and throughout our city as a people who prays big and who trusts their big God to move mightily.

In Jesus’ name. Amen.

#walkworthy #walkworthy365 #Jeremiah7 #IfyouabideinMe #unansweredprayer #joyfulpersistentprayer