Persisting in prayer
AJM Holy Trinity Jan 18th
2004 am
Reading Psalm 141
Introduction
Good morning. Today’s subject is persistence in prayer. Persistence - what
does that make you think of, when I say it? What about the prayer bit? What is
prayer, for you? What are the thoughts and feelings the word conjures up? Determination? Despair? Thanks? Bewilderment?
What is prayer, exactly? At times in my life I’ve thought it an astonishing
non-event, an extraordinary way of passing the time in a world of make-believe.
At others I have known my life and sanity to depend on it. Which is it for you?
And then what about the persistence bit? What does that suggest to you?
We don’t exactly live in a world which believes in persistence, do we. We live
in a world which craves instant gratification, instant success. Watch the
weight drop off with the Atkins diet. No need to save up, buy it now on credit
– take the waiting out of wanting, the slogan goes. Or what
about the whole phenomenon of celebrity. We don’t have heroes any more,
people who got there by a long haul; instead we have idols and icons, propelled
into fame by the media machine. Microwaves give us instant food. Drugs give us
instant fixes. The internet gives us instant answers. We are conditioned to get
what we want, and get it now.
And yet God talks about persistence in prayer. I chose this psalm as
the reading, instead of the better known gospel stories, just to challenge our
thinking, to throw us into the contrast we experience between the biblical
teaching on persistent prayer and our natural desire for instant solutions. So
let me start by highlighting three things from this psalm.
1. Verse 1. I call upon you,
Lord, come quickly to me – that’s OK, isn’t it, we’re on familiar ground
there. That’s the cry of our age, the cry of our hearts. That’s what we want,
that’s where we all start. Prayer is a cry for help.
2. But then there’s verse 2. Let
my prayer be counted as incense before you. What does that mean? Well, I
thought we’d try it, and for the first time in Trinity’s history burn some
incense. You probably noticed it as you came in. So let’s think about it. David
says he wants God to experience his prayers as incense. What does incense do?
It hangs in the air. It lingers as a fragrance, as an offering, as a reminder.
It’s a kind of symbolic way of soaking the air in prayer.
3. And now there’s verse 5. Never
let the oil of the wicked anoint my head, for my prayer
is continually against their wicked deeds. He prays continually not only
about things that have happened, but about things that have not. For David,
prayer is a way of life, part and parcel of the equipment with which he
confronts the business of living. Prayer is that which keeps him safe in God’s
hands.
So. Instant answers; a
lingering fragrance; a habit? What is this stuff called prayer? Let’s
pray!
Persistence – do we do it?
As I thought about the issue of persistence in the context of our instant
world, it occurred to me that perhaps there are some things in which we do
persist. A week ago I listened to a talk by a man used to dealing with people
who have gone through experiences which have been deeply traumatic – accidents,
natural disasters, acts of war or terrorism, incidents of emotional or physical
abuse. He went through lots of helpful things, then he said if all else fails,
there’s this.
I did try it once, but I don’t recommend it!
But seriously, we do know a lot about persistence, don’t we. We persist
in pain. We persist in depression. We persist in grief. In Victorian times they
even had a timetable for how long you should persist in your grief for. Look at
this. It tells you how long you have to visibly mourn for when someone close to
you dies:
Queen Victoria herself persisted in her pain for far longer than this –
she was still in mourning for her husband 40 years after his death.
What else do we persist in? Some of us persist in guilt, for years,
even though this is the last thing God intends. There are some stringent
passages in the Bible for those of us who persist in sin, in unbelief. But then
we persist in positive things too. We persist in hope, in desire, in ambition.
We persist in trust, sometimes way beyond what is realistic. We persist in our
commitment to those we love. Persistence is built into our nature. Why: because
we live embedded in time. We do not and cannot live in the present moment,
however much we might want to; we have a past and a future. And it is in the
relationship between that past and that future, and in the relationship between
time and eternity, that our prayer life takes shape. That is why it has to be
persistent. It has to fill these gaps.
Persisting in prayer : the teaching of the
Bible
So prayer is like
incense, David says. It’s something which is always there, which hangs in the
air from morning to night. Our prayer life is meant to be the same; prayer is
something we don’t just do at single moments, but which we are meant to persist
in. It is something which takes us from our world of the present moment into
eternity. It is a means of healing our past and safeguarding our future, and it
is a means of moving from this troubled world into the timelessness of heaven.
When the apostle John was given a vision of heaven he saw golden bowls full of
incense, which are the prayers of the saints; as the smoke of the incense
burned, so the prayers went up before God. Think of your prayers like that, as
an offering from your life of pain and of hope, to God who is preparing you for
another life where, as John says, there will be no more death or mourning or
crying or pain. It is prayer which joins the two.
So what is this
meant to look like in practice? Jesus tells us, Luke chapter 18. There was a
widow and a judge. The widow wanted justice. She wasn’t getting it. The judge
wasn’t as bothered by that as he should have been. But there was one thing he
was bothered by: this woman wouldn’t get off his back. She kept coming to him.
She pleaded. She reminded. She repeated. Eventually the judge got fed up with
this. ‘Because this widow keeps bothering
me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually
coming.’ If even a lazy judge gives in to repeated requests for justice,
how much more will God do so, says Jesus – you must pray always and not lose
heart.
Now to me this
sounds a bit like nagging. I don’t know about you, but I was brought up to
believe that not only would nagging not work, it was likely to be
counterproductive. Surely Jesus can’t be teaching us to do what every parent
tells their child not to do? But it seems that he is. Luke 11. How are we to
pray – pray like this, he said, offering what we know as the Lord’s Prayer. But then he gave an illustration. 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, for a
friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him. And he
answers from within (as you would),
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. I tell you, says Jesus, 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.
Why, we ask. Why
should we have to nag God? I find the answer in the incense. Our prayers must
hang in the air. There is a kind of prayer that needs to hang around. It needs
to hang not with the winge of the child, but with the fragrance of a sacrifice.
It isn’t the tone of a nag Jesus is recommending – the dreaded Muuuum… It’s the persistence. The steadfastness. The consistency.
This is not a spoilt child, who wants sweets in a supermarket; it’s a
determined child, who wants God’s blessing, a hurting child, who wants God’s
comfort. There’s a world of difference. And so David calls on God for help, and
adds ‘let my prayer be counted as incense
before you’ – don’t mind my tone, just please Lord realise I mean it, I
need it, I am going to persist in it.
And if we look at
the prayer life of some of the giants of scripture, persistence is exactly what
we find. Take Abraham. Abraham didn’t take no for an answer when God
was planning to destroy Sodom. Six times he came back to him, until God agreed to
spare the city if there were even 10 righteous people in it. Abraham got quite
nervous about it ; ‘oh do not let the Lord be angry
with me if I speak just once more…’.
Then there was Jacob. Jacob wanted God’s blessing. He
wanted it very badly indeed. He tried to get it by cheating his brother out of
their father’s blessing. He tried to get it when he fell in love with Rachel,
even though he had to serve 7 years, marry her sister, and serve another 7
before he could have Rachel herself. He and she together tried to get it
through bearing children, even using her maid as a substitute when nothing
happened. He tried to get it by tricking his father in law out of his best
sheep. Eventually it occurred to Jacob that blessing comes through prayer and
not through human ingenuity. So he prayed. He prayed for a whole night, and it
was like wrestling with an angel. The angel said to him that he would get his
blessing – because he had stuck at it with God and with man, and prevailed.
Jacob got lots of things wrong, but one crucial thing he had understood – you
have to persist.
Then there was Moses. Moses prayed for 40 days and 40
nights on Mt Sinai, and came down with the instructions about the ark and the
tabernacle and worship, and the tablets of stone with the 10 Commandments on. A lot of stuff to get through. When he got down he found
that the people, who lacked his persistence, had got fed up with waiting and
had made a golden calf and started worshipping that instead. God was
understandably furious, and determined to destroy them. So what did Moses do –
he smashed both the commandments and the calf, and spent another 40 days and 40
nights in prayer, pleading with God to have mercy. God gave in to him.
And there were
others. There was Nehemiah. There was David. There was Daniel. All these people
knew that the only way to get through the pain and difficulty of life, and the
only way to turn hopes into reality, was to persistently pray. And it wasn’t
just heroes who understood this. Ordinary people understood it too. Jesus was
travelling in Syria. A local woman had a daughter who was
demonised. She wanted Jesus to heal her. Jesus refused, saying he was sent only
to the Jews. What would you have done? I think I’d have gone away, furious at
the unfairness of it, but nonetheless gone away. Not this woman. This woman was
assertive. She persisted. She argued
with the Son of God. And she got what she wanted.
Persisting in prayer : the importance of
relationship
So what do we do
with all that? What sense do we make of this apparent need to persist, to nag,
to argue with God? And even if we accept it, do we have the energy to do it?
Well, lots of
people have tried to get their mind round all that. I’d just like to share two
thoughts with you.
1. Firstly, God himself persists. He’s persisted for centuries in working
with people who wobble, waver, go in the wrong direction and make a mess of
things big time. He sent his Son to do the same. Jesus persisted. Jesus
persisted with his task of love until it killed him; such was his persistence
that he gave his life to save us. And we are made in the image of God. Perhaps
God is really looking for the people who are most like him, so that he can work
with them. Jacob wasn’t really a very nice guy, but persistence was the one
thing he had going for him. And he got God’s blessing. In the New Testament
it’s not just the reasonable and polite people who get God’s blessing, it’s the
stroppy ones, the argumentative ones. God can use the people who just won’t
take no for an answer. Don’t lose heart when you pray, Jesus said to the
disciples; just be like the woman who nagged the judge. Keep at it. And God
won’t receive your prayers as nags, he’ll receive them
as incense. God likes that kind of thing. In the world, persistence is the key
to achieving. In the kingdom, persistence is the key to receiving.
2. Secondly, God wants relationship. He’s not a push-button God, he’s a
talk-to-me-God; spend 40 days and 40 nights with me and I will be there when
you need me. He’s not a machine, feed in your request get the answer out of the
slot; he’s a person, a trinity of persons, made in and for relationship. And
the relationship with us happens through prayer. ‘A man’, said Dr Johnson, ‘should keep his friendship in constant repair’.
And the same is true of our friendship with God. Three years ago I sat in the
sheepshed at the East of England Showground and listened to a man called
Wilfred Lai. He’ll be there again this August, and if you want to listen to
someone who knows about prayer, go and hear him. Wilfred Lai is from the
Jesus Celebration Church in Mombasa, Kenya. Wilfred Lai wanted God to bless his
ministry. He wanted it very much indeed. Wilfred Lai was working his socks off
trying to grow his church. Wilfred Lai noticed that Jesus would spend hours
alone in prayer at the beginning of each day. Wilfred Lai decided to change his
strategy. Wilfred Lai decided that his church would pray at 4.30 every morning;
that their prayers would hang in the air before God like incense – though,
being a good Pentecostal, he didn’t put it like that. But the next thing that
happened was that 5000 people joined the church. 8 years later it had grown to
20,000. Wilfred Lai has written a book. He calls it:
Prayer - a powerful weapon for your breakthough.
Now Wilfred Lai says he has understood two things.
Not that the key is to pray at 4.30. But this:
that if Jesus needed to persist in prayer, so do we.
that persistent prayer is answered because it builds up
a relationship between you and God.
He invited us to
think about Daniel. Daniel routinely prayed 3 times a day. For Daniel, prayer
was a way of life. Daniel was persistent in prayer even when there was no
particular issue to pray about. He was so persistent that when an edict was
passed banning prayer, Daniel continued to pray. And when the crisis came,
Daniel received answers to his prayers for help. We develop intimacy in a human
relationship by talking and sharing; that if such intimacy is not there, the
relationship is unlikely to bear fruit in times of testing. And perhaps it is
not so very different with God. Perhaps it’s like making a phone call. You
recognise your friend’s voice immediately because they call you all the time.
Otherwise they will have to explain who they are, why they are calling. It’s
the same, he said, with God.
I found this to be
true when Roger was in hospital 7 years ago. There he was, hovering between
life and death in intensive care. Lots of people sent me cards. But I remember
one in particular, from another minister. I trust and believe,
he wrote, that God has prepared you for this. And as I thought about it I
realised that he had. In what way had he prepared me? He had taught me to know
that he loves me, and he had taught me to engage with that love through prayer.
So how do you pray, when someone you love is in intensive care for 3 weeks,
fighting for his life? Well, you pray. How do you pray? You pray persistently.
You pray all the time. We all prayed. Between us we prayed 24 hours a day, and
we offered our prayers to God like incense, just as David did in the psalm. I
couldn’t pray 24 hours a day, but someone gave me a little wooden cross,
specially shaped to fit snugly into your hand. It was a praying cross. So I
prayed all day, and all night I said to God I am going to sleep holding this
cross, and this cross will be my prayer. I went to sleep holding it in my hand,
and I woke still holding it in my hand. It was an unspoken, night-long prayer,
a contract between me and God. What happened? Roger got better, in some
remarkable ways that made it clear this was not just a medical triumph but also
a spiritual one. I suppose I could have done it as the Catholics do, by
lighting candles and leaving them to burn as a sign of their continued prayers.
Or I could have pictured my prayers as incense, hanging in the air before God.
It doesn’t matter. These are all just ways of saying to God, I know you. I know
you are there. I am used to you being there. I am used to talking to you. And I
want you to do this for me. I really want
you to do this for me.
A letter from God
Let me read you
this. It’s a letter from God. It’s written from God to someone who has not yet
learnt to persist in prayer. Maybe that person is you.
As you got up this morning, I watched you and hoped you would
talk to me, even if it was just a few words, asking
my opinion or
thanking me for something
good that happened in your life
yesterday —
but I noticed you were too busy trying to find the right outfit
to put on and wear to work.
I waited again. When you ran around the house getting ready I knew
there would be a few minutes for you to stop and say
hello, but you were
too busy. At one point
you had to wait fifteen minutes with nothing to do
except sit in a chair. Then I saw you spring to your feet. I
thought you
wanted to talk to me but
you ran to the phone and called a friend. I watched as you went to work and I
waited patiently all
day long. With all your
activities I guess you were too busy to say
anything to me.
I noticed that before
lunch you looked around, maybe you felt
embarrassed to talk to me, that is
why you didn't bow your head. You
glanced three or four tables over and you noticed some of your
friends talking to me briefly before they ate, but you didn't. That's OK. There
is still more
time left, and I have hope that you will talk to me; and yet you
went home, and it seems as if you had lots of things
to do.
After a
few of them were done you turned on the TV. I don't know if
you like TV or not, just about anything goes there
and you spend a lot of
time each day in front of
it, not thinking about anything — just enjoying
the programme.
I waited patiently again as you
watched the TV and ate your meal but
again
you didn't talk to me. At bedtime I guess you felt too tired. After you
said goodnight to your family you flopped into bed
and fell asleep in no
time. That's OK because
you may not realise that I am always there for
you. I've got patience more than you will ever know. I even
want to teach
you how to be patient
with others as well. I love you so much that I will
wait every day for a nod, prayer or thought or a thankful
part of your
heart.
It is hard to have a one-sided
conversation. Well, you are getting up
again
and once again I will wait with nothing but love for you hoping that
today you will give me some time. I love you.
Your friend,
GOD
Some examples to follow
It’s easy to live
like that, isn’t it. But we don’t have to. We don’t need to be experts in
prayer. We just need to do what David does. He prays for help. He prays with
the persistence of incense. And he prays as a habit.
Now when you
persist in prayer, two things happen. Firstly, something happens out there, in
the world: things change. And secondly, something happens in here, in the
heart: we change. So I’d like to end by telling you about two people in our own
times who have learnt to persist in prayer.
The first is William Wilberforce, a deeply committed
Christian whose greatest aim was to bring about the end of slavery in this
country –not an easy task, and one which certainly required a great deal of
persistence. This is what he wrote to the Anti-Slavery Society by way of
encouragement:
Abraham
Lincoln failed in business in 1831.
Was defeated for Legislature in 1832.
Second business failure in 1833.
Suffered nervous breakdown in 1836.
Was defeated as candidate for Congress in 1843.
Was
defeeated as candidate for Congress in 1848.
Was defeated as candidate for Senate in 1855.
Was defeated as candidate for Senate in 1858.
Was elected as President in 1860.
Our motto
must continue to be
perseverance.
And ultimately I trust the Almighty will
crown our efforts with success.
As we all know, he
did, and one of the greatest evils of the world was righted.
So that’s what
happens out there, when you persist in prayer. But what about
in here? The second person I want to tell you about is Nelson Mandela, released from prison
after 27 years. What would you have come out like, do you think, after 27 years
in prison? Would you have persisted in pain, and emerged bitter and hard at the
injustice which had been done to you? Or would you have persisted in prayer,
and emerged knowing yourself to be loved by God,
changed and renewed by that knowledge? Well, this is what Mandela wanted to
tell the nation he had learnt, in his inaugural address as President of South
Africa:
Our deepest fear is not that we are
inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are
powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most
frightens us.
We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be
brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God. Your playing
small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about
shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as
children do.
We were born to make manifest the
glory of God within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in all of us, in
everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own
fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
That is a man who
had learnt to persist in prayer, a man who must have cried out to God just as
David did, and a man who has learnt that it is not the pain of our
circumstances but the reality of God’s love which defines us.
But that’s all
very well. Perhaps you feel you aren’t Abraham Lincoln, or Moses, or Mandela.
You’re made of more modest stuff. Then just let me leave you with a question:
how did the snail reach the ark?
You can do it, if
you want to, as easily as I can burn this incense. Try it. Try it literally, if
you like – get an incense stick, burn it, and offer its fragrance to God as you
pray. Then ask that those prayers may linger in his presence just as the scent
of the incense lingers in the air.