Every Day is a School Day (4)

Persevering in Prayer

Luke 18:1–8 “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 about men. 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 about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’ ” 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?””

A former Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple was once asked why he bothered to pray? Isn’t prayer just wishful thinking or a waste of time to which he memorably responded that he noticed this about praying: “When I pray, coincidences happen. When I don't, they don't.”

Prayer is vital for the Christian and so we must PERSEVERE in it BUT as we pray we need also to understand that sometimes when we pray, we don’t always get WHAT we want, WHEN we want it.

Nevertheless, Jesus encouraged us to keep on praying and to not become discouraged. He taught a parable about a widow who continually appealed to a judge for justice until the judge finally granted her wish.

The point of the parable was this—if a cold-hearted judge gave a poor widow what she needed, how much more will our warm-hearted Father give to His children what we need!

THE PARABLE: A parable - a tool of communication often used by Jesus - is basically an illustration drawn from everyday life to communicate a deeper spiritual or moral truth.

When Jesus would teach a parable, he would teach it intentionally with the idea of causing people to have to think more intently and to read between the lines.

In this particular parable, the main point here is , “That men always ought to pray and not lose heart.” Jesus encourages us to pray because praying keeps us in faith and hope and keeps us from becoming discouraged.

He uses an illustration about a widowed woman, seeking justice for some wrong treatment that she received. Now a widow represents someone in dire need. in Jesus day a widow had no independent means of providing for herself, she is one of the most disadvantaged people in society and for her to suffer injustice on top of this is intolerable!

The judge in the story is not a good one! He did “neither feared God not cared about men” which makes him not a very desirable or good judge as he could just make a decision without caring about the justice of it or the fairness of it and true to form here, he dismisses this woman’s complaint, as bothersome and not worth his time or even his attention.

However, the more that this judge dismissed this woman, the more persistent she became until finally she wore him down! - ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’ ”

And this gets to the point of the parable - Luke 18:6–8 “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?””

And don’t miss that link to the Second Coming - In Luke 17:20-37, Jesus is teaching on His Second Coming and he says of it that, “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all. “It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. “It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. On that day no one who is on the roof of his house, with his goods inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. Remember Lot’s wife! Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it. I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and the other left.” In other words, beware of indifference to Gospel claims; beware of settling down and procrastinating becoming “lukewarm” to Jesus!

“Faith is the furnace of our lives. Its fuel is the grace of God. And the divinely appointed shovel for feeding the burner is prayer. If you lose heart and lay down the shovel, the fire will go out, you will grow cold and hard, and when the lightning flashes from sky to sky and the Son of man appears in glory, he will spew you out of his mouth (Revelation 3:16).”

This is a parable not of comparison but contrast.

Jesus is not comparing God morally speaking to an “unjust Judge”, anymore than Paul is comparing Jesus to a “thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). The point of comparison that Jesus is a thief in the night in the sense that His coming is sudden and unexpected and in this parable, just like the unjust judge responded to the constant appeals of the widow in the story, God who is a God of justice and mercy, a God who cares about men unlike this judge, will also respond to his praying people when they cry to him day and night.

So in v7 Jesus draws out the lesson which he intends: "will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?." “God is for us, who can be against us?”(Rom 8:31). This is why we ought to “always pray and not give up.

If you cry to God day and night, if you always pray and don't lose heart, if you wrestle in prayer and are determined and intentional in your praying saying Lord I will not let you go until you bless me; I will not let go, then God will come through for you!

If you will persevere in faith and love for God and will be rewarded and God will vindicate you when the when the Son of Man comes. Therefore, always pray and don't lose heart!

Hold on to your faith that He might find you faithful when He comes and remember what Jesus said of His Father in Heaven, “Fear not little flock, it is the Father's good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”(Luke 12:32).

However, when it comes to prayer, there is something we need to get hold of when we pray because Jesus is implying here that when we pray we don't always get what we want, or we don’t always get what we want WHEN WE WANT IT! Why?

Why don’t we always get what we want when we want it from God?

1. Because IT IS NOT HIS WILL FOR YOU!

God has a perfect will for our lives and sometimes MY WILL and HIS WILL are not the same and are not aligned.

So, the question is, the issue is, how quickly will I discern his will to join in on what his will is for my life? Matthew 26:39 “Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.””

The cup Jesus was referring to is the cup of suffering, and Jesus is suggesting here that there may sometimes be things which are in accordance with MY WILL that won’t accomplish the purposes of God in my life and sometimes in order to accomplish God’s purposes, I need to accept the way of suffering.

The Bible is clear about the importance of asking in accordance with God’s will for our - “this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us" (1 John 5:14).

Our motives in prayer must be godly. We must not seek any gift of God to consume it upon our lusts and selfish desires - “You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures" (James 4:3).

And actually PRAYING IN ACCORDANCE WITH GOD’S WILL is wonderfully releasing. Think og all the promises of God to us in Scripture. We can certainly bring these to God in prayer - Spurgeon once said: "There is no need for us to go beating about the bush, and not telling the Lord distinctly what it is that we crave at His hands. Nor will it be seemly for us to make any attempt to use fine language; but let us ask God in the simplest and most direct manner for just the things we want...I believe in business prayers. I mean prayers in which you take to God one of the many promises which He has given us in His Work, and expect it to be fulfilled as certainly as we look for the money to be given us when we go to the bank to cash a check. We should not think of going there, lolling over the counter chattering with the clerks on every conceivable subject except the one thing for which we had gone to the bank, and then coming away without the coin we needed; but we should lay before the clerk the promise to pay the bearer a certain sum, tell him in what form we wish to take the amount, count the cash after him, and then go on our way to attend to other business. That is just an illustration of the method in which we should draw supplies from the Bank of Heaven." (The Kneeling Christian, Clarion Classics, 1986, Zondervan Publishing House, Page 79-80).

E. Stanley Jones said it this way: ‘Prayer is surrender, surrender to the will of God and cooperation with that will... If I throw out a boat hook from a boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.’

2. Because it’s not HIS TIMING FOR YOU!

We might discern God's will properly, but not His timing - Not the WHAT of God’s will but the WHEN!

Moses was God’s intended deliverer of the slaves of Egypt but when he took matters into his own hands and killed the Egyptian slaveholder for beating a Hebrew slave, he ended up in trouble and on the run. He was God's deliverer but he needed training in the wilderness of Midian for forty years until he was really ready to be a shepherd who would lead the people out of slavery.

Likewise the Apostle Paul, when he was on the road to Damascus and had this wonderful encounter with Jesus and got saved and became a believer; he at once began to preach the Gospel and doubtless thought that it was all uphill from here but then he immediately received resistance to his message and ended up having to escape for his life from Damascus and ended up in the deserts of Arabia in isolation for eighteen months, before he was ready to preach again!

When Jesus was so popular that the people wanted to take him by force and make him king, Jesus slipped from their grasp because he says, ‘My time has not yet come.’

God not only has a PERFECT WILL for you, he also has a PERFECT TIME for you to accomplish it in so we must be patient:

“How glibly we talk of praying without ceasing! Yet we are quite apt to quit, if our prayer remained unanswered but one week or month! We assume that by a stroke of His arm or an action of His will, God will give us what we ask. It never seems to dawn on us, that He is the Master of nature, as of grace, and that, sometimes He chooses one way, and sometimes another in which to do His work. It takes years, sometimes, to answer a prayer and when it is answered, and we look backward we can see that it did. But God knows all the time, and it is His will that we pray, and pray, and still pray, and so come to know, indeed and of a truth, what it is to pray without ceasing.” —ANON. The Necessity of Prayer by E.M Bounds).

Psalm 27:14 “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”

Micah 7:7 “But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Saviour; my God will hear me.”

One excellent example of patient waiting on God is found in the writings of George Muller: “I have myself had to wait for a long time to get certain blessings.  In many instances the answer has come instantaneously, or in the same hour, or the same day; yet in other things I have had to wait years—ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, and upwards—yet invariably at the last the answer has come.  And I say it to encourage my brethren and sisters in Christ, Go on waiting, waiting, waiting.  Begin afresh to bring your petitions before God.  He will hear you.  For one thing I have been praying for thirty-nine years and nine months, and the answer has not yet come.  Last evening I prayed for it, and the evening before last I prayed again.  When traveling in India and America, year after year I have been praying and I am sure that in the end the answer will come.  I have received tens of thousands of answers to prayer, but in this particular I have to wait.  For the conversion of the parents of one friend I prayed and the answer came when the father was between eighty and ninety years old.  This very individual had cast off his son entirely; for years he did not allow him to come into his presence.  At last he sent for him, and then would scarcely allow him to go out of his sight; yet for twenty years I had to pray for his conversion.  So with the mother.”

And let me tell you something very encouraging. Muller interceded for more than half a century for the salvation of a small group of men. He once wrote: “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 or 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 remain unconverted.  The man to whom God in the riches of His grace has given tens of thousands of answers to prayer in the self-same hour or day in which they were offered has been praying day by day for nearly thirty-six years for the conversion of these individuals, and yet they remain unconverted.  But I hope in God, I pray on, and look yet for the answer. They are not converted yet, but they will be.” Those two men, sons of a friend of Muller’s youth, were still unconverted when he died in 1897, after having prayed daily for their salvation for fifty-two years.  His prayers were answered, however, when both those men came to faith in Christ a few years after the great intercessor’s death.

3. Because it’s not HIS BEST FOR YOU!

God sometimes doesn't answer our prayers, not because He doesn’t care but because He cares too much to let us make mistakes that could fundamentally alter our lives for the worst.

Sir George Adam Smith tells how he and his guide were climbing the Weisshorn in the Swiss Alps. It was stormy and they were making their climb on the sheltered side of the peak. When they reached the summit, they were filled with the exhilaration. Sir George forgot about the fierce winds, leaped up and was nearly blown over the edge to the glacier below! The guide grabbed hold of him and exclaimed: "On your knees, sir. You are safe here only on your knees!"

We often think WE KNOW WHAT IS BEST FOR US but in fact so many things, we remain ignorant of what God is doing and we fool ourselves into thinking we know what is best for. Listen to these collection of funny and ridiculous prayers that I found Online:

“Lord, I ask that you give me the superpower to eat as much pizza as I want without gaining any weight. It would truly be a miracle and make my life complete. Amen.”

“Lord, I ask that you make all the calories in donuts and ice cream disappear, so I can indulge guilt-free in my favourite treats whenever I want. Amen.”

“Oh mighty God, I humbly request that you make chocolate a healthy superfood, because life without chocolate is just not worth living. Amen.”

These prayers all point to a desire that comes from the flesh but although we might not dream of offering such prayers, how often have we prayed to win the lottery without considering what so much money could do to harm us; to meet and marry the gorgeous person we meet at work, without considering their moral character or their spiritual standing with Jesus; to get that long-sought after job without thinking about how stressful or demanding it might be.

When we pray we need to ask, LORD GIVE ME ONLY WHAT IS BEST FOR ME. Let my desires be aligned with your good will for me that I may always surrender WHAT I WILL “to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 2:5)

We don't know what God's will is, we don't know what God's timing is, and we don't always know what God's best is; that's why we need to keep praying with persistence until we find out, until it's clear.”

In Matthew 7:7, Jesus says: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” All three of those verbs—ask, seek and knock—are in the Greek present active imperative, meaning continual action. It literally translates ‘ask and keep on asking, seek and keep on seeking, [and] knock and keep on knocking.”

We don't always what God is up to, so it's good for us to be persistent in prayer until God reveals his will, his timing and his best for us. So, Paul says in Romans 12:12 “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.”

As draw near to the application of this sermon today, I recall the words of William Barclay: “When we pray, remember: 1. The love of God that wants the best for us. 2. The wisdom of God that knows what is best for us. 3. The power of God that can accomplish it. - Prodigals and Those Who Love.

APPLICATION:

So we must PERSEVERE IN PRAYER because although our faith is being tested, we need to remember that God will always answer our prayers because if you think back to our parable! It’s a series on contrasts:

God is not like a cold-hearted judge; He is a loving and warm-hearted Father.

We are not praying to One who sits as a Judge in a Court of Law, we are coming to a Merciful God on a throne of grace.

We are not just seeking justice from God, we are “receiving mercy and grace to help us in our time of need”(Heb 4:16).

Let me give you one wonderful example of this from the minsitry ofJesus in relation to the Caananite Woman in Matthew 15:21-28.

She came to Jesus with a desperate plea for her very sick daughter, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terribly from demon-possession.” And how did Jesus respond at first? “Jesus did not answer a word.” Oh how very perplexing for her and we could be forgiven for thinking she must at this stage be very agitated and frustrated.

The disciples , clearly were and perhaps because she was a Gentile were also prepared to dismiss her saying to Jesus, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” “US!” she didn’t apper to be too concerned about them, she wanted Jesus and so she kept on saying, “Lord, help me!”

Then He put her off again, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel...It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.” To which she replied, “Yes, Lord,...but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” And Jesus responded to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.”

Jesus responds to the fervency and desperation of a hurting mother! He responds to her persistence and her unwillingness to let go until God granted her what she asks for. That is the prayer of faith! The prayer of confidence and the prayer of surrender!

This is why we need to PERSEVERE IN PRAYER!

Every day is a school day when it comes to prayer. Prayer is not an obligation, it is an invitation to commune and connect with God by both talking to Him and listening to Him! God has much to teach us in prayer: “To pray is to accept that we are, and always will be, wholly dependent on God for everything. Prayer is the way that all the things we believe in and that Christ has won for us actually become our strength. Prayer is the way that truth is worked into your heart to create new instincts, reflexes, and dispositions...To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule—it is a failure to treat God as God.” ― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“No man can do a great and enduring work for God who is not a man of prayer, and no man can be a man of prayer who does not give much time to praying...The central significance of prayer is not in the things that happen as results, but in the deepening intimacy and unhurried communion with God at His central throne of control in order to discover a "sense of God's need in order to call on God's help to meet that need" (E.M. Bounds: Power through Praying).

Words are not as important as the heart of prayer and the asking of prayer, the requests for ourselves and others are always to be caveated with the “YOUR WILL BE DONE!” in the Spirit of prayer! Ephesians 6:18 “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.”

Posture is not important! There is no right way to pray, and the only wrong way to pray is if we don't. You can stand, you can sit, you can kneel, lift hands, close eyes, open eyes. You can pray on the run, you can pray in public, you can pray in private. You can pray in the morning, pray in the evening and pray every time in between, but the main thing is, be persistent in prayer - Colossians 4:2 “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.”

Never give up! 1 Thessalonians 5:17 – “Pray without ceasing.”

And never forget the command to pray, the need to ask Jesus to “teach us to pray” and the vital need to rely on the Holy Spirit in prayer, remembering always the possibility and potential of praying to your Heavenly Father who can Ephesians 3:20–21 “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”