Prayer: Persistence Despite the Questions

¹He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” ²He said to them, “When you pray, say:

⁵And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; ⁶for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ ⁷And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ ⁸I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

⁹“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. ¹⁰For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. ¹¹Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for^£ a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? ¹²Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? ¹³If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit^£ to those who ask him!”

More than forty years ago, a book was published entitled “Barriers to Christian Belief.” It dealt with some problems that over the years have proven to be real obstacles and stumbling blocks for people in their faith pilgrimage… specific problems that hinder people, that burden people, that disturb people… and keep them away from the Christian faith. One of the barriers listed in that book was "unanswered prayer." [1]

I once knew a young man for whom this became a profound problem. At about the age of 16 years old, his grandmother became very sick. She was a faithful, devout woman, who always counseled her grandson to go to church, to rely on his faith, and to live a good Christian life. He didn’t work all that hard to live out her advice, but he did respect her and came to church and attend youth group. Eventually she became very ill. As she got more and more sick, she advised him to pray for her. He was afraid for her life, so he prayed. He prayed like he had never prayed in his entire life.

Unfortunately, despite all his prayer, she died. That young man, now in his twenties, is an atheist. His journey to atheism all began with that fervent prayer that went unanswered. The journey to atheism probably all began because he believed that had God let him down. Or perhaps that journey started with a feeling deep down that he had let his grandmother down, that she believed that if he prayed she would survive. And he prayed. But she did not survive. So maybe his prayer was not good enough, not strong enough, it was his prayer that failed her… In the mind of a 16 year old boy, such tragically flawed ideas are not impossible, despite the grace of God and the surrounding messages of God’s mercy.

It does seem to be a fact of human experience that many people get discouraged and give up and drop out of faith because they feel a sense of failure in their prayer life.

There are many questions and there is much misunderstanding about how to pray and why.

Charles Schulz once created a Peanuts cartoon in which Charley Brown is kneeling beside his bed for prayer. Suddenly he stops and says to Lucy, "I think I’ve made a new theological discovery, a real breakthrough. If you hold your hands upside down, you get the opposite of what you pray for."[2]

There was a radio preacher in eastern North Carolina who spent most of his air time asking for money. The owners of the station began to receive complaints and consequently they established a new policy and told the minister that he could no longer ask for money over the air. Surprisingly, the preacher took the news rather well and simply asked if there were any limitations on his prayers. "Oh, no," said the manager, "You can pray as you please." That afternoon, during the broadcast, the radio preacher announced prayer time. He prayed for the usual things… and then concluded his prayer with this sentence: "Lord, you know I am not here to ask for money, but my address is Box 296, Piney Bluff, North Carolina!"[3]

The prominent pastor Chuck Swindoll tells this story about a prayer that he and his wife prayed for quite some time.

When my wife and I were at Dallas Seminary back in the early 1960s, we lived in a little apartment where in the summer the weather came inside, and it was hot. Hot? Hotter than you can imagine. Like a desert.

That hot fall we began to pray for an air conditioner; we didn't have one. I remember through the cold blowing winter we were praying for an air conditioner. Through December, January, and February, we told nobody, made no announcement, we wrote no letter; we just prayed for an air-conditioner.

The following spring, before we were to have another summer there, we visited my wife's parents in Houston. While there, one morning, the phone rang. We hadn't announced our coming; it was for a brief visit with her folks and mine before we went back to seminary. The phone rang, and on the other end of the line was a man I hadn't talked to in months. His name happened to be Richard.

I said, "How are you." He said, "Great! Do you need an air conditioner?" I almost dropped the phone. "Uh, yes."

"Well, we have just put in central air conditioning here, and we've got this little three-quarter ton air conditioner that we thought you might like to have. We'll bring it over and stick it in your trunk and let you take it back, if that's okay."

"That'll be fine, Richard. Bring it on over." We put that thing in the window, and we froze summer and winter in that little place![4]

For me, what makes this prayer remarkable isn’t that Chuck Swindoll prayed for an air conditioner and he got it. In fact, in some ways this is ridiculous too. The fact that Chuck Swindoll prayed for an air conditioner and got it, while my young friend prayed for the life of his grandmother to be spared and didn’t get it, and is now an atheist, is quite a bit disturbing. It says something about prayer - that we cannot predict prayer. A prayer that we think is worthy to be answered may not be answered and a prayer that we think may be a little ridiculous, may in fact be answered and rewarded. It’s a little frustrating actually. But ultimately we are not in charge of prayers being answered, but that God is in charge of prayer and that God answers some prayers and doesn’t answer others and sometimes we simply don’t know why and certainly we cannot predict which will be which.

What is so remarkable to me about the Swindoll family’s prayer for an air conditioner is the faithfulness and the persistence of praying for an air conditioner in the fall when it’s hot in Texas, through the winter, when it most certainly is not hot all the way through the Spring and into Summer again. Can you imagine this young couple, huddled together in blankets and freezing in that drafty, cold apartment, in December and January praying for an air conditioner?

Yes, some prayer is ridiculous and all prayer is unpredictable, but biblical prayer is certainly persistent.

In the parable that Jesus tells regarding prayer, he draws an analogy to the man who pounds on his friend’s door in the middle of the night and begs him for three loaves of bread. The friend disturbed from his sleep, gives his friend the bread, not because he loved his friend so much, or because he “owed him one” or because his friend deserved it. “Because of his persistence he got up and gave him whatever he needed,” says Jesus.

As an immigrant, my mother lived in constant fear of deportation. You could miss up to four questions on the citizenship test, and Mom missed five. The question she flunked on was: "What is the Constitution of the United States?" The answer she gave was: "A boat." Which wasn’t entirely wrong. The USS Constitution was docked in Boston. But the judge instantly denied her citizenship. My father stormed up to the judge. "What is this? Let me see the test! She’s not wrong—the Constitution is a boat!" The judge rolled his eyes and said, "No, the Constitution is our basic governing—" "It’s also a boat in Boston! The Constitution! Same thing! Come on!" The judge finally couldn’t take any more. He said, "Fine. She’s a citizen. Now get out of here!"[5]

That judge wanted that crazy man, who happened to be Jay Leno’s father, out of his court, so he just gave the man’s wife citizenship and told them all never to come back!

Persistence in prayer is the most challenging aspect of prayer. Persistence in prayer reveals the depth and integrity of a praying person’s soul.

You’ve all heard the adage, “There are no Atheists in foxholes.” Perhaps you recognize this statement as a clear, honest cynical crack at all those folks who ignore God and in the moments when all is at stake, they pray, they plead with God, they beg God and they even bargain with God.

In the late 1970’s Burt Reynolds played in a movie called “The End.” He finds out that he has a terminal disease and has only six months to live. He decides that he doesn’t want to live even that long and the rest of the movie is an endless slapstick procession of suicide attempts. What makes it particularly funny is that after his first attempt, he’s taken to an asylum where he runs into Dom Deluise and they decide to do the dirty deed together.

In the final scene of the movie it seems that they succeed. Burt Reynolds swims out into the ocean and makes a pretty convincing attempt at drowning himself. One of the last shots is what must be Reynolds’ view from about 10-15 feet underwater, looking up through the murky depths between him and the surface, and he begins to realize that “O MY, I’m really going to die!” He doesn’t like it and the last gag of the film comes after he yells out, “I want to live! I want to live!” only this last attempt has been a pretty good one, and now he may really, not survive. As he begins to panic, he begins to flail and push toward the surface of the water. He also begins to pray. And as he prays, he starts to bargain with God. He promises such things as never missing a day of church, as selling all his possessions and giving them to the poor, as promising never to be angry and mean to anybody ever again.

But that’s not the end of it. As the camera begins pulling away and the credits begin to roll, and we see that he’s getting closer and closer to the shore, his prayer to God changes and he begins pulling out of his promises, “Maybe I’ll go to church once a month, or maybe I’ll go to church on Christmas and Easter.” “Maybe I’ll just give away some of my money to the poor.” “Maybe I’ll be mean only when I’m really angry and not all the time…”

This is not the persistence of praying for an air conditioner through the winter. This is not the persistence of the one who prays despite doubts and confusion and not understanding how and when God answers.

This is not the prayer of a disciplined, regular follower of Christ, who himself was in prayer and obedient to his father despite his doubts.

In the family in which I grew up, whose heads and leaders happen to be here with us this morning, it was a custom to pray before each meal. We would pray in Armenian:

If we were sitting at our dinner table at home, we could not ever begin a meal without this prayer. My brother might sneak a cucumber from the salad, or I’d take a bite from a kufte on my plate. But it felt like we were stealing something, and then when everyone did come to the table, and you were praying, the food you were too impatient to wait for, was now stuck in your cheek, or even worse in your throat as you prayed.

Today, in our home, Alex leads us in prayer. We still say the Ov Hayr Ohrneh prayer sometimes, but usually, Alex wants to lead us in prayer.

A typical prayer is usually a variation on this: “God thank you for our food, God thank you for our love, God thank you for you, Amen.” These prayers are not so much reflective of deep theological insight, as a window on the sweetness and innocence of a 4 year old soul. But again, when we’re sitting around the dinner table at our house or at Medz Mama’s and Medz Baba’s or at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s homes, we cannot start without a prayer.

At the dinner table our prayer was rote and regular, at bed time, we had a similar prayer that we prayed for many, many years that was rote, ritualistic and predictable. Over the years that prayer gave way to quiet extemporaneous prayer that I for one prayed fresh every night. The childhood innocence of such praying however gives way to late nights in a college dorm, minds full of not so innocent things at bedtime and prayer patterns change. Now frankly, in a life in which it’s hard enough to get home for dinner with the family on a consistent basis, prayer life suffers as well.

In a life where many answer to prayer seems so unpredictable and so many prayers seem to go unanswered, its difficult to remain honest, sincere and regular in our prayer life. God invites that honesty. “Express your anger in your prayers – Yes at God!” say the example of David in the Psalms. Yet this is so hard, so foreign to most of us, that our disapointment and anger at God goes unexpresses and we just prefer not to pray.

In our regular prayer life, persistence, consitency and honesty are perhaps the most difficult challenges. Yet according to this parable from scripture, this is what is most valuable. The content of the prayer is important, the form and the function - how you pray and what you pray for, but what is most important is that you pray.

The Apostle Paul says to his colleagues in Thessalonica, “¹⁶Rejoice always, ¹⁷pray without ceasing, ¹⁸give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”[6]

And notice how prayer is tied in what Paul says to joy and thanksgiving, not just to asking and receiving.

“¹⁶Rejoice always, ¹⁷pray without ceasing, ¹⁸give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”[7]

Its difficult and we all fall short. Yet the example of Christ and his encouragement is that we persevere, that we develop that discipline and we pray despite our doubts.

My hope for each of us is that we find the consistency, the courage and the strength in God to pray without ceasing and with persistence and reap the rewards of God’s grace and mercy and abundant reward.

[1] from “illustrations@ministersmail.com:on behalf of eSermons.com, Illustrations for July 25, 2004” e-mail to Ara Heghinian, July 21, 2004

[2] from “illustrations@ministersmail.com” as above

[3] from “illustrations@ministersmail.com” as above

[4] “Do You Need an Air Conditioner?” Charles Swindoll, "Reasons to be Thankful" Preaching Today, no.50. from “illustrations@ministersmail.com:on behalf of eSermons.com, Illustrations for July 25, 2004” e-mail to Ara Heghinian, July 21, 2004

[5] Persistence/Assurance: The Constitution Is a Boat! from “illustrations@ministersmail.com:on behalf of eSermons.com, Illustrations for July 25, 2004” e-mail to Ara Heghinian, July 21, 2004

[6] Thessalonians 5:16-18

[7] Thessalonians 5:16-18

Luke 11:1-13