8 Hanging On
8 
Hanging On
Hanging On
I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.
The phrase “hanging on” makes me (J. I.) think of the time many years ago when my wife Kit and I were taking a little-used path to see a waterfall. The path had not been well-maintained. Kit did not have any problem with it because she has always been very agile; she is like a mountain goat on unstable terrain. I am different. I was always clumsy, and besides I have a high center of gravity; at least, those are the excuses I give for losing my balance more quickly than some. The path became a badly cambered slope, tilting sideways on the right side toward a steep bank down into a stream. To steady myself, I put one hand up and gripped a small branch of a tree that overhung the path. Then my foot slipped! As I began to descend streamward rather ungracefully on my backside, Kit yelled, “Hang on!” She meant, I suppose that I should hang on to the branch because it would arrest my descent. But, alas, the branch had broken. Nevertheless, when my wife yells for me to do something, I ordinarily do it, so as I slipped ever more awkwardly down the bank, I held on firmly the entire time to this bit of broken branch. I’m glad to say that I didn’t end up in the stream; a tree root stopped me a little distance down the bank, and I scrabbled back to the path. I remember the laughter on Kit’s face as I held up my tiny twig of supposed safety. But I had indeed hung on.
The opposite of hanging on is letting go, which in terms of attitude means “giving up.” It is said, whether truly or not, that right at the end of his life Winston Churchill was asked to speak at a “Prize Day” at his old school. When the moment came, he toddled up to the microphone and simply said (this was the beginning and also the end of his speech) “Never, never, never, never, never give up.” Then he sat down. Very Churchillian, even if it never happened! It chimes in with a cartoon hanging on the corkboard in J. I.’s college office. Pictured is a pelican that has in its great beak the head of a frog. But the rest of the frog is outside of the beak, in fact the frog’s front legs are splayed wide gripping and squeezing the pelican’s narrow neck. The legend that goes with the picture is a version of the same formula that Churchill is alleged to have used: “Never, never, never give up.”
When J. I. was a student, the president of the InterVarsity chapter that was nurturing him had a phrase that he constantly used for encouragement: “Keep on keeping on.” The phrase called for what in Britain was termed “stickability,” for which the North American’s equivalent is “stick-to-itiveness.” Spiritual stick-to-itiveness in the face of discouragements of all sorts was what this chapter president was asking for when he used those words. Hanging on, as J. I. hung on to his little branch, is a phrase that means the same thing.
Hanging on to God in praying is often hard. Life is full of forces that tug us away from prayer. Disappointment in some project in which we have invested much of ourselves will take the wind right out of our sails, so that we now find it hard to pray, especially if we had prayed much for God’s blessing on the project when it started. Health troubles can make us feel that the effort to keep on praying is too much for us and so we stop. Broken relationships and breakdowns in the family exhaust our souls, creating a sense of discouragement that makes us feel that prayer simply does not work, and that if God has let us down in this all-important matter, why should we pray about anything at all. Clinical depression can become a blight on prayer: our body chemistry combines with circumstances to color our whole world gray and make everything seem hopeless—including our efforts at praying. Hanging on in prayer during such circumstances is the specific problem area that the present chapter addresses.
My (Carolyn) friend Maggie for many years served as a confidant to a mutual friend who suffered from depression—and for reasons that none of us could fix. Our depressed friend often found it difficult to pray or even to believe in a loving God. Maggie prayed with her from time to time, encouraging her to sit in silence save for adding a simple amen to prayers on her behalf. One day Maggie gave her a “pocket rock,” carefully chosen from her garden for its smooth shape, subtle colors and perfect size. “Keep this rock in your pocket,” Maggie told her friend. “When you can’t believe, when you can’t pray, hold onto this rock. It is a reminder that God is your rock, and that (for now) I am believing for you.” I am glad to say that our friend survived those difficult years and continues today as a woman faithful in prayer—often now on behalf of others. For someone clinically depressed, praying alone may simply be impossible—temporarily anyway. Hanging on to God in prayer may mean for such a person praying with others for a time, listening in to their prayers, trusting their faith, until God through the mercy of medicine, counseling and shifted circumstances brings healing.
Hanging on in prayer is often, then, difficult for us. But deciding not to pray because of lost projects, lost health, lost relationships, lost family or lost peace of mind is not at all a rational decision. Patience and persistence and perseverance in praying are real Christian virtues that we are sometimes required to work hard to maintain. Much of this effort is inner and hidden, like hand-carved gargoyles under the roofline of some Gothic cathedral, never seen by anyone but God. But prayer is truly the inside story of the Christian’s life, and keeping it going is therefore very important. Earlier in this book we made quite a point of saying that “Help” is regularly the best prayer we can make (see pp. 53). To ask the Lord to help us to keep going (to hang on) in fellowship with him, in spite of every circumstance that discourages us, is always an excellent prayer.
How does God help us to be persistent in praying? By leading our minds to dwell on four things: (1) the relationship that calls for and undergirds persistent praying, (2) the records of persistent praying in Scripture,
(3) the reasons why persistent praying becomes necessary, and (4) (conversely) the resistance to persistent praying that we have to overcome.
This kind of help works like a spiral tunnel on the railroad. (There are a number in Switzerland, and a famous one on the Canadian Pacific line through the Rockies.) The train enters by the bottom portal, gains height by spiraling up within the mountain, and exits above, sometimes directly above, where it went in. When you look down, therefore, you may see the entry point right below you, and in any case, being higher up, you will see more as you look around than you could see before. In the same way, dwelling on the four realities we will review may, with God’s blessing, enlarge our vision of God and his ways (for, when we are under strain or living with depression, our vision of God easily grows narrow and cramped), and thus hope, strength, and resolve will be brought back into the heart. All truth enters the heart via the head, that is, the understanding, said the Puritans, following Thomas Aquinas. That statement is just as true when we are in low spirits as it is at other times, when we are in a calmer and more cheerful state of mind. May God help us all toward enlarged vision and firmer determination in our praying as we tunnel our way (excuse our whimsy!) through the thoughts we are now to deploy.
RELATIONSHIP
Earlier on, we looked at two of Jesus’ parables that must have had his disciples scratching their heads. In one, a friend comes knocking on the door at midnight in order to borrow some bread and is at first roundly rebuffed, though he gets the bread in the end through what we would call sheer cheek. In the other an unjust judge gives in, cynically and resentfully, to the persistent visits of a widow (the widow is a regular biblical figure for the underprivileged person). “This widow troubles me,” he said, “so I’ll give her what she wants in order to get rid of her.” Did Jesus tell these stories to give us an image of God our heavenly Father as a reluctant donor of things we badly need? No! Jesus showed in many other settings that God the Father is loving and generous and righteous and faithful and wants to give good gifts to his children. But Jesus told these stories to encourage us “always to pray and not to lose heart,” which is exactly how Luke introduces the story of the unjust judge (Lk 18:1), to make sure it will not be misunderstood. Persistent, insistent petitioning, according to our Lord Jesus, is most certainly appropriate when the pressure is on. But why is this if God is truly our loving heavenly Father and truly wants to give us good gifts?
Here is a question that is not always well answered. It is not, as some seem to suppose, that passionate petition twists God’s arm, so to speak, and thereby coaxes out of him what he had not originally wished to give. Nor is it that passionate petition, working itself up to an inner certainty that the gift requested will be given, induces God to give what he would not have given had it been asked for in a more low-key style. “One parable illustrates one point” is the usual rule in Jesus’ teaching, and the one point of the stories just referred to is that we should pray insistently and persistently about crucial needs, not because God will not meet them unless we do but as if he would not. Why does Jesus teach us, and therefore clearly want us, to do this? Four reasons, at least, may be given.
First, God the Father loves to be petitioned in a way that shows he is appreciated as the source of all that is good. This glorifies him.
Second, the Father wants to see that we are taking both our acuteness of need and his greatness as the one who can meet it with absolute seriousness. This takes us beyond superficiality in the way we think, feel and live, and binds us closer to him because of the clarity with which we realize that he is really our only hope.
Third, the Father knows that the more earnestly we have asked for a particular gift and the longer we have waited for it, the more we will value it when it is given, and the more wholeheartedly we will thank him for it. This will lead to increased joy.
Fourth, the Father’s larger plans for blessing us and others may require him to delay giving us what we ask for until the best time and circumstances for its bestowal are reached. To keep asking with patient persistence and to wait with expectation for the answer is thus sometimes necessary, and is always the reverent way to go. This strengthens the muscles of our faith, as constant walking strengthens the muscles of heart and legs.
The fact to focus on for encouragement, however, when we seek to express the persistence of our faith in the prayers we go on making as we face short-term disappointment and desolation, is that there is a covenanted family bond that unites us to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, and unites the Three-in-One to us forever and ever. Paul describes universal Christian experience when he writes: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:16-17). Professed Christians who neither testify to this testimony nor rejoice in the identity that it confirms are, to say the least, very much out of sorts. Being children of God is our supreme privilege and security—and is at all times the supreme incentive to us to pray.
The Christian’s sonship to God the Father is both by adoption, which bestows the family status, and by regeneration, which is the work of the Holy Spirit renewing the heart and thereby bestowing in embryo the family likeness. Adoptive sonship in Paul’s world was regularly a wealthy childless citizen’s choice of someone to be his heir and carry the family name into the future, and that is the analogy that God through Paul uses here. In contrast, regeneration of heart has no secular analogy: it is a creative change effected in union with Christ, instilling in us a God-centered, God-exalting cast of mind that is inexplicable in terms of anything that was there before, just as the source and destination of the wind are more than any observer can know (Jn 3:8). Regeneration is an outgoing of the same power that brought this world into being (through a big bang?) when previously there was nothing there at all (nothing to go bang, therefore)—absolutely nothing in existence besides God. The twin blessings of adoption and regeneration, while not shielding us from any of life’s grimmer experiences, do turn us into unique people with unique privileges and a unique destiny, and when the bad experiences come it is vital that we do not forget who and what we are.
Luther is reported to have said that religion is a matter of personal pronouns, and indeed it is. Marriage illustrates this, for marriage is a covenantal bond by virtue of which the parties can say “my husband” and “my wife.” Childhood illustrates it too: the child’s sense of identity grows directly out of being able to say “my dad, my mom.” So also God’s covenant with us enables us to say “my God,” and the covenantal reality of our adoption enables us to say “my Father.” By the same token, each of us may speak of the Lord Jesus, in whom we put our faith, not only as, in Thomas’s words, “My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28)—though that is where our faith must start—but also as “my brother”—older brother, as reverence moves us to say—for, wonder of wonders, he calls us all his brothers. “Go to my brothers [the whole band of disciples],” said the risen Lord to Mary Magdalene (Jn 20:17), and Hebrews 2:11-12 says, “He is not ashamed to call them [believers] brothers, saying, ‘I will tell of your name to my brothers’” (the quote is from Psalm 22:22). (“Brothers” in these texts is the generic masculine; “brothers and sisters” explicates the meaning.) To realize that we are in solidarity with Jesus as siblings, if we may so put it, in the Father’s family is a huge support in times of inner distress and the self-belittling thoughts that depression and harsh circumstances bring on, and that is why we highlight the matter here.
The Holy Spirit ministers as the agent of the Father and the Son, so in light of what has been said it should be no surprise to us to read: “You [believers] have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Rom 8:15)—that is, who has imparted and now sustains our filial instinct for affirming and addressing the Father of our Lord Jesus as our Father too. Nor should it surprise us to find Paul stating the gospel like this: “When the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal 4:4-6). So Paul teaches us to be aware that the Spirit of God is prompting us to cry for ourselves in certainty and confidence, “My Father, my God.” That is the privilege of Christ’s people.
Constantly in the Gospels the Lord Jesus presents the Christian life as, to borrow a phrase, “life with Father.” In Matthew 6, the central chapter of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus shows his disciples how to pray and give, and where he speaks of amassing eternal treasures, and where he tells them not to be anxious about daily needs, God is “your heavenly Father” throughout. The same is true in much of chapter 7, where he warns them against censorious judgment of their brothers and encourages them to pray expectantly for what they need. Each teaching is grounded on their relationship with God as their loving, listening, providing, righteous, powerful, generous Father. Throughout this sermon God’s Fatherhood is seen as yielding a basic moral structure for Christian living.
The business of a father is to protect and look after his children, as well as to nurture them in the way in which he wants them to go when they are grown. Within that frame of the covenanted family relationship between us believers and our God, we see in Scripture his promises to answer prayer, promises that remain permanently valid, for God is always faithful to his own word. Feelings have their ups and their downs, but whether the sun is shining or whether the clouds are down and the rain is falling, the promises of God still stand. We touched on them in previous chapters, and here we simply underline the certainty of their fulfillment when duly invoked. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Mt 7:7). He is talking about persistent praying. All three verbs in the Greek are in the present tense, which express continuous action, keeping on keeping on doing what we do. Jesus says, “Keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking.” Then he gives the reason why: “For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Mt 7:8). Amazing! But that is what Jesus says, and all his words are true.
So according to Jesus, there is no such thing as unanswered prayer when a faithful child of God brings requests to his or her heavenly Father. The prayer will be taken notice of. As we have seen, it may not be answered in the form in which we offer it. It may be answered by God making us aware that there are things in our life that have got to be changed before he can give us what we have asked for. It may be that he will answer our prayer in a way which makes us realize that we were not asking for precisely the right thing in the first place. So God answers the prayer we ought to have made rather than the prayer we did make. But that is not unanswered prayer.
Jesus must have known that his disciples drew a breath when he spoke the promise “Everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” It sounds too good to be true. So he adds, in order to make sure that they take his point, “Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Mt 7:9-11). This line of thought is a tremendous incentive to bold and persistent prayer.
The promises of God, made as an expression of his family-covenant relationship with his people, give us incentives and directives that encourage us to pray persistently, hanging on to the words that our God has spoken, never mind how discouraging the immediate circumstances and how exhausted our inner feelings. Given the encouragements that are ours within our relationship with the Lord, we cannot wonder that the apostle Paul should direct us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17). Exactly! That is what we must learn to do.
RECORDS THAT ENCOURAGE
We can take records of persistent praying in the Bible as object lessons for us, and so we look here at two categories of these object lessons. One is persistent praying in the Psalms; the other is examples of persistent praying by three of God’s servants: Nehemiah, Hannah and Zechariah.
God gave us the 150 psalms of the Psalter to be our prayer book as well as our hymn book. They establish perspectives and lines of vision and patterns of communion between ourselves and the Lord that all our praying, praising, hymnology and liturgy ought to follow as a guide. The psalms have a technical term for persistent praying, usually translated “Wait.” We wait on or wait for the Lord. In ordinary secular use waiting sounds like inactivity, but in the psalms waiting on and for the Lord is just the opposite of inactivity; it is a sustained effort of keeping on keeping on in prayer and expectation. It involves focusing on the Lord, attending to the Lord, asking the Lord to help us to hang on until the time for his action comes. “Wait for the LORD; / be strong, and let your heart take courage; / wait for the LORD!” (Ps 27:14). Dogs in training must learn to stand motionless, unmoving and unmovable when the owner or trainer says “Stay.” One wonders if Eugene Peterson had this in mind when, in The Message, he paraphrased “Wait for the LORD” in that verse as, “Stay with GOD.”
“Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; / fret not yourself. . . . / Wait for the LORD and keep his way, / and he will exalt you to inherit the land,” says David in Psalm 37:7, 34. Here The Message says, “Quiet down before GOD . . .” (no panicking, no diminishing of desire for God to show his hand), but “wait passionately for GOD.” These words go far to describe the resolute hanging on that persistent prayer becomes.
Psalm 40, also from David, is a testimony of God’s response to this kind of praying:
I waited patiently for the LORD;
he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the pit of destruction,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure.” (Ps 40:1-2).
That opening phrase in The Message is “I waited and waited and waited for GOD.” The Hebrew expression thus rendered is, literally, “Waiting, I waited.” “I waited patiently” is one attempt to capture the thought that “I kept on waiting until . . . and then at last God moved.”
Psalm 62, another psalm from David, is striking in that it adds the ingredient of silence to this hanging on in prayer. In verse 1 we read the following, “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation.” The term “in silence” expresses the thought of having got beyond complaining, and no longer rushing to and fro making a noise as people in trouble tend to do. “I am waiting in silence; I know that God has heard my prayer. I am waiting now for him to rescue me.” In verse 5, David admonishes himself: “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence.” He reminds himself that “my hope is from [God].” The Message, in both verses, gives us a broken sentence, “God, the One and Only—I’ll wait as long as he says.” How succinct! How directly to the point of hanging on in quiet prayer—for however long it takes. Here, as in the other psalms quoted, we find an encouraging example for imitation.
One of the songs of ascents depicts most vividly the longing and the hope that goes with this kind of waiting prayer. As pilgrims ascended on their long-wearing trek to their thrice-annual worship in the temple at Jerusalem, they sang these psalms to express their hopes. Psalm 130 pictures the patience of a night watchman assigned to guard the walls of a city, perhaps Jerusalem itself. He works every night, no doubt slowly pacing atop the wall, watching for signs of movement in the darkness below, guarding, listening, doing his job. But he knows that every night his task is completed when sunlight creeps into the eastern sky. The sun has made this appearance after every night of his life. It has signaled the end of his shift; he will go home to rest. His hope in God is as well-founded as is the predictability of dawn. Dawn always comes. So as the pilgrims climbed on their journey, right up to Jerusalem’s guarded walls, they reminded themselves, through prayer, of their hope in God.
I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning. (Ps 130:5-6)
The repeated last line with its footstep-type rhythm signals, even to our ears, the faithful plodding of the watchman on his rounds—in hope, as he watches for dawn. And so we hang on to God in hopeful prayer, as watchmen wait for the morning, as watchmen wait for the morning.
Now we turn to two biblical stories of persistent praying, one about a man, the other about a woman. Here first is Nehemiah, whose book is a public figure’s personal memoir, like a politician’s autobiography today. We have met Nehemiah before, in passing; now we must focus in detail on the first stage of his recorded testimony. The book starts with a date, then records a prayer, then gives another date. “It happened in the month Chislev, in the twentieth year, as I was in Susa the capital, that Hanani . . . came with certain men from Judah” (Neh 1:1-2). These men brought bad news: the walls of Jerusalem, those walls that watchmen had once guarded so carefully were flattened; even the gates in the walls had been burned. Hostile forces occupied the surrounding territory, and the few Hebrews remaining within the circle of crumbled walls were in “great trouble and shame” (v. 3).
Burdened by this news, Nehemiah fasts and prays for the restoration of Israel in Jerusalem, and he works up to praying thus: “Oh, Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name.” (From his sidelong reference we can see that Nehemiah has not been praying alone; he has enlisted others who have been praying with him about the need in Jerusalem.) Here is the final request of his prayer: “And give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man” (Neh 1:11).
Who is “this man”? In the last words of the chapter we find that it is King Artaxerxes, monarch of Persia. What is the mercy that Nehemiah asks for? His friends from Jerusalem, and others too perhaps, must have told him, and he must have agreed with them, that if he were put in charge in Jerusalem he had what it would take to put everything right there. But Nehemiah is not free to go. His position is that of a high-class slave. “Now I was cupbearer to the king” (v. 11), he says. This means that every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, he has to be at the palace to taste in advance the food and drink being prepared for the banquet that evening, at which he will keep an eye on all aspects of the food service and personally hand the king the royal goblet. It was high-risk employment, because in those days political opponents would on occasion poison the royal food and drink in order to get rid of the monarch. The cupbearer’s ministry was primarily to detect any poison; this he would do by getting sick and maybe dying in the king’s place. If that happened, the king could of course easily get another cupbearer the next day. High-risk employment, indeed! No wonder slaves or aliens were usually selected for it. But that was Nehemiah’s job. Actually, it was a position of great dignity while it lasted, for it gave constant intimacy with the king. Cupbearers often became influential people in ancient palaces, and we may suppose that this very able man Nehemiah was one such already. But at the same time this was a job that tied him down. Royal retainers had no statutory holidays, and in any case there could be no time off for the cupbearer. The king ate and drank every day! So when Nehemiah says, “I was cupbearer to the king,” it was an indication of impossible circumstances. Going to Jerusalem for long enough to repair and resettle its ruins seemed to be ruled out from the start. Nonetheless Nehemiah and his friends give themselves to prayer that somehow or other Nehemiah will be enabled to go to Jerusalem and do the job.
In the opening verse of chapter 2 we find another date: the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes. Nehemiah then tells us exactly how in that month, in an amazing way, he was appointed on the spot as the king’s special commissioner (soon it was governor, and it may have been that from the start) to go to Jerusalem to rebuild it. How far apart were these dates? Nine months. Each day, one supposes, the group had prayed, “Give success to Nehemiah today; grant him mercy in the sight of the king”; and they had had to wait. Persistent waiting—what we have called hanging on to God—had marked their praying, just as it should mark ours when the needs will not go away; and God answered their prayer at the right time, as he always does. So at last Nehemiah was off on the most challenging task of his life, in which, as we know, with God’s constant help, he succeeded brilliantly.
Hannah too was a person willing to hang on in prayer. In the first chapter of 1 Samuel we hear about Hannah praying for a child, and it is clear that she has been praying for a long time. Hannah and her husband, Elkanah, and his other wife (along with the other wife’s children) travel every year to Shiloh, where the ark is, to make their annual sacrifices. Hannah is mocked by her rival wife, comforted by her husband with extra food (which she refuses to eat) and remains brokenhearted that the Lord “had closed her womb” (v. 5). Elkanah, a warm-hearted, unimaginative man, cannot empathize with her ongoing distress. (“Am I not more to you than ten sons?” [v. 8].) Still she prays that she may have a baby. Her prayers are so intense that she sways back and forth, putting her whole body into her praying; her prayers are so private that she says them only in her mind, though her voiceless lips keep moving; the family circumstances are so painful that she weeps as she prays. She promises that if God gives her a son, he will be a special servant of God all of his life (v. 11).
Eli the priest, taking it easy, leaning in his chair against the doorpost, was evidently not accustomed to such prolonged and intense praying, particularly by a woman. He thinks she is drunk—and says so (v. 13). Most women in Hannah’s distress about this embarrassing problem of infertility would have simply slunk away and let him think what he wanted, but Hannah did not do that. She recalls him to his priestly duties, duties that events surrounding Hannah’s part in the story suggest that old Eli has been sadly neglecting. Hannah tells Eli exactly what is wrong. “I have been pouring out my soul before the LORD” (v. 15). Eli has seen this woman come to the temple year after year; now he knows the source of her grief and the subject of her prayers. Through Hannah, Eli rises to his calling as priest and pronounces a blessing prayer—which God honors: “Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant your petition that you have made to him” (v. 17).
Four years later, Hannah presents young Samuel, now age two or three, to Eli to be a lifelong servant of God, which Samuel in fact became throughout his life in his role as Israel’s prophet, priest and anointer of kings. Hannah could not have known, during her years of painful prayers, how and when God would bring about his response. We, however, with our privilege of New Testament hindsight, can see how important those prayers were and how God used them at the right time for the spiritual welfare of his people and for the glory of his own name.
Similarly in Luke 1, we read about the elderly priest Zechariah, who also was childless. It is clear that he and his wife had been praying about that, probably throughout their marriage, but with no results so far. Luke introduces their story by saying, “They had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years” (Lk 1:7). Then an angel appears and says, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness . . .” (Lk 1:13-14). How many years had Elizabeth and Zechariah been praying for what the lawyers call “issue”? We don’t know. But what a marvelous work of God is now announced by the angel: God has heard your prayers—and Elizabeth will bear a son. The son is to be named John. You both will have joy at his birth, and he will have a supremely important ministry preparing people for the coming of the Lord. What a wonderful assurance for these aging parents to hold on to during the anxious months prior to John the Baptist’s arrival! Once again we see the wisdom and goodness of God, answering sustained faithful prayer at the strategic moment and in the way that gives the answer maximum significance in the larger divine plan.
PERSISTENT PRAYER: THE REASONS WHY
Earlier in this chapter we gave brief reasons why our praying about matters of weight and urgency, short- or long-term, ought to be sharply focused, deeply serious and—to use the overworked contemporary word—passionate in style. Here we glance with similar brevity at the related, indeed overlapping, question, why does God require us and regularly make it necessary for us to be patient, persistent and persevering as we ask for specific blessings and then wait on him for the answers? As the two questions overlap, so may our responses to them.
First, by compelling us to wait patiently for him to act, God purges our motives. Often our first formulation of a request is more self-centered and self-serving than it ought to be, just because of the many layers of egocentricity that encase our sinful selves, like the successive skins that encase the heart of an onion. As we wait on God, repeatedly renewing our requests, he leads us to see that the initial motivations of our asking, heartfelt as it doubtless was, were more concerned with comfort, convenience and glory for ourselves, and less with his honor, praise and glory than was right. Thus, by showing us how he sees our praying, our heavenly Father peels off us some of those layers of self-absorption, so that we reangle and reshape our requests, and our motives become more pure in his sight. These repeated and repeatedly revised petitions are not the “vain repetitions” that Jesus warns his disciples against but are our progressively distilled longings that God will glorify himself by the way that he enriches us his servants. Through the waiting process God is attuning us more directly to himself.
Second, by compelling us to wait for him, God shapes his giving in a natural way. Though arresting answers to prayer, quick and spectacular, are sometimes given, it is not God’s way to multiply miracles indiscriminately. The significant clusters of miracles furthering the exodus, establishing the political ministry of Elijah, Elisha and their successors, vindicating Daniel as a man of God, and verifying the messiahship of Jesus and the new creational kingdom proclamation of the apostles are often celebrated, but it is not so often noted that miracles are always the exception, never the rule, and that God’s evident will for most of his servants a great deal of the time is that they live wisely, obediently and reverently within the ordinary processes of ordinary life.
Look again at how God answered Nehemiah’s prayer. He kept Nehemiah and his friends, who prayed constantly for miraculous mercy from the king “today,” waiting for nine months—250-plus days. During that time, as was inevitable and, as we see, part of God’s intention, Nehemiah’s downcast look as he gloomed about Jerusalem became more and more part of him, to an extent that doubtless he did not realize, for he knew that looking sad in the presence of a Persian monarch was regarded as a form of treason and was punishable by death. (That is why he was “very much afraid” [Neh 2:2] when the king finally commented on his haggard and glum appearance.) In that age of beards and poor-quality metal mirrors, however, a man could easily miss being aware of how he looked. When the king, who evidently liked and respected Nehemiah, spotted and spoke of his appearance, correctly diagnosing the trouble as “sadness of the heart,” it gave Nehemiah opportunity to speak frankly, without disrespect, of the ruin of Jerusalem and how it had affected him. Nehemiah, as we said, could not have raised the subject of a leave of absence himself, but now with friendly and solicitous goodwill the king himself raised it. Interested in the problem of Jerusalem because of his concern for Nehemiah personally, he asked what Nehemiah would like him to do about it. Here, at last, casually arising as part of a personal chat, was the moment that the praying posse had been seeking each day from God throughout the previous nine months! What the Jewish cupbearer-slave was in no position to make happen by any form of conventional engineering, his tragic face—marked and lined by nine months of grieving and now evoking kindly concern rather than the expected anger—had brought about for him. Nehemiah fired off an arrow prayer to God, made his request, and was soon on his way. Prayers answered? Yes! By miracle? No, by a natural flow of events—which took time. Ordering a natural flow is God’s habitual way of answering prayer, and it very often takes time, so we have to be willing to wait.
A third reason why persistent prayer is necessary is that God’s nurturing strategy sometimes rules out immediate answers. Children say to parents, “I can’t wait.” And all of us who are parents have from time to time said to our children, “You’ve got to learn to wait.” The ability to wait is one of the differences between childishness and maturity. Mature people are, among other things, persons who have learned to wait. God is in the business of maturing us in Christ, and this lesson is integral to adult Christianity. Babies are not born with “wait buttons,” as any nursing mother is well aware. But by toddler stage patient parents begin teaching their child to wait. Slowly a healthy child matures and begins to recognize priorities, even that some priorities are more important than his or her own. They learn patience; they learn to curb impulses; they learn to observe priorities; they learn to endure. This is what the writer of Hebrews describes as the path to spiritual maturity: “It is for discipline that you have to endure” (Heb 12:7). Sometimes God uses delayed responses to prayer to discipline and train our spiritual muscles. We hang on in prayer, and our faith muscles grow stronger. We learn to curb our impulse to doubt, to blow up in anger, to grab whatever we can get. We learn to trust God—and to keep on praying.
Discipline means training. In what and for what is God training us by obliging us to wait on him for answers to prayers? Paul answers this in part when he makes the absurd-sounding claim that we Christians, who are justified by faith and know peace with God, can “rejoice” in suffering. How so? “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:3-5). Did Nehemiah and Hannah and Job and Paul suffer in their times of waiting for God as they prayed over and over their troubles in ignorance of what God’s timing for action might be? If we define suffering broadly, to cover all forms of not getting what you like while not liking what you get, the answer is, of course they did. We suffer similarly when our prayers seem to be achieving nothing.
So what can we do in the meantime, besides (of course) keep on praying? We can allow this suffering and waiting to move us along the sequence that Paul so vividly describes: allowing suffering to produce endurance, the quality of “keeping on keeping on,” which in turn builds our character, which then produces hope, confidence, that is, that God will keep us going, as he has done so far, until we reach our final glory. And our hope is reinforced by assurance that God loves us, now and forever (see Rom 8:38-39); knowledge of this love of God has been poured into us by the indwelling Holy Spirit—whether or not our prayer is being answered in the time or the way we most wanted. Through this continuing process of all-round progress, we can become content to let God choose the best time to give his best gifts.
OVERCOMING RESISTANCE TO PERSISTENT PRAYER
We have now looked at a series of reasons why we should hang on to God in prayer, but anyone who has walked with God for any length of time will know that this is much easier said than done. Why is persistent praying so difficult? And now we come back to the jeremiad with which this book started. Let’s be honest, persistent prayer is difficult. And though we keep up appearances, perhaps very successfully, we all wish in our hearts that we were steadier and better altogether at keeping up communion with God, praying with sustained concentration, persistently, about situations of need, and praising with persistence too as we go along. Why do we find such persistence so hard? It is because the world, the flesh and the devil combine to oppose all forms of the life of prayer and to resist all our efforts to live it. Limits of space rule out any attempt to deal with this resistance in anything like an adequate way, but a few quick comments may be made.
The world, meaning community life organized without and against God, will seek to distract and derail us from our praying by implying that this is a weird and pointless way to behave. The broad way of the world, namely, living without regard for God, is a way that it has always been tempting to lapse into. We want to do what other people do, and they do not pray constantly, so why should we? They fill their lives with this-worldly activities and involvements, so that in any case prayer is ruled out for lack of time, and why should we not do the same? Any number of things seem to them more important than making prayer a habit, and are they not perhaps right? Thus, insidiously, the world works all the time to keep us from praying.
The flesh, meaning the inner dynamics of our human hearts as twisted by still-present indwelling sin and not yet fully reordered by grace, is weak, as we can see from what took place in Gethsemane. When the disciples ought to have been praying with and for Jesus as he had wanted them to do while he himself prayed for strength to go through with what was coming that very night, he found them asleep. “The spirit [that is the regenerate heart] indeed is willing,” said the Lord Jesus sadly, “but the flesh is weak” (Mk 14:38). Again and again, when we have something spiritually significant to do (and that includes prayer, every time), desire, motivation, strength of heart (that is, of mind and will), zeal and single-minded concern for God’s service and glory will be lacking, and we will need to ask our Lord to reenergize us through the Holy Spirit to keep us from total collapse. When Jesus said: “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation” (Mk 14:38), this was undoubtedly what he had in mind.
And then, of course, there is the devil, “your adversary,” as Peter calls him, who “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8). Satan is not a creator but a destroyer; wrecking God’s plans and ruining human souls is all he wants to do. At the close of Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus, he directs: “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil” (Eph 6:11). Part of that armor appears in verse 16, where Paul talks about taking the shield of faith with which to “extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one.” What Paul is referring to is what we would call dirty warfare as practiced in the first century A.D. “Flaming darts,” or “projectiles,” were spears or arrows or javelins with burning cloths, dipped in oil, tied to their points so that when they hit they would burn as well as pierce, and so do double damage. “You will need the shield of faith,” says Paul “to quench those fiery assault weapons.” The metal shield of a Roman soldier would deflect all projectiles and be impenetrable by flames. Similarly, Paul means, active faith that calls on the Father, the Son and the Spirit for strength to stand firm against all distortions of revealed truth, all discouragements from faithfulness to it and all temptations to despair, will make you invulnerable to Satan’s frontal attacks. Nothing changes that.
God-given faith, then, will quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one, all those assaults that take the form of reasons to stop praying and throw our hands in, in relation to our fellowship with God, temporarily if not permanently. We find ourselves telling ourselves that resistance is hopeless; we can’t hold out against the temptation any longer, and that’s that. The blazing arrows are wishful harmful thoughts of that kind, which damage our souls as water dripping through our ceilings damages the carpets and furniture, and faith must take action to quench them.
The supreme example in Scripture of the kind of wishful, harmful thinking that we, following Paul, have in mind is Eve’s thinking when Satan tempted her and deceived her into eating the forbidden fruit. “The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Gen 3:6). With these thoughts in her mind, realization that eating would be unbelieving disobedience, on which she had been clear a moment before, escaped her. Unbelief regularly begins as thoughtlessness of this sort. Satan put ideas into Eve’s head, and she didn’t think, didn’t make herself remember, what God had said to Adam. Unbelief will begin for us with similar thoughtlessness if we give it half a chance. Should we ever forget God’s redeeming love in Christ and our holy calling as servants of Christ and our hope of heavenly happiness through Christ, it would be a lowering of the shield of faith, and then Satan’s next flaming arrow would, spiritually speaking, strike us square in the face.
But faith will keep us going in obedience; pray always. Faith will keep us in expectation; hope always. Faith will keep us hanging on to God in prayer despite all the discouragements that we feel; grip God’s promises always. There are tricks that we can use; different tricks help different people. If you find that your thoughts wander when you are praying silently, pray aloud. If you find that once the day gets going you can never find time to pray, get up earlier and pray before you do anything else. If you find that your thoughts and words simply won’t come together, write out the petition that you are seeking to get into focus and use your own written prayer to present the matter to God. You may find that keeping a journal in which you record the prayers that you’ve been looking to God to answer is a great help; some do. Take note of whatever distracts you from prayer and try to avoid it. These are just commonsense tools of help. They will not make hanging on in prayer easy; but they may help to make it possible.
Get real then in prayer. Get serious and keep going. It matters that we keep going because of the relationship with our God that we are called to maintain and move along in. Follow the advice of the motto of Oak Hill College in London, England: “Be right and persist.”
It may bring clarity and realism here to declare explicitly that all the modes of prayer that we have reviewed, petitioning, praising, meditating and maintaining each of these under pressure, are acts of war—defensive and counterattacking warfare against the supernatural being who is God’s sworn enemy and ours too. The massive topic of spiritual warfare and the place of prayer in it is more than we can open up here, but what was said above tells us what is essential for us to know. In all our communion with God, Satan and his hosts are opposing us every step of the way, constantly seeking to weaken us and drain our strength by indirect means in addition to the direct attacks that they periodically mount against us. With regard to this aspect of our Christian lives, however Luther’s classic hymn has it right.
A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing;
Our helper he amid the flood
Of mortal ills prevailing.
For still our ancient foe
Doth seek to work us woe;
His craft and power are great,
And armed with cruel hate,
On earth is not his equal.
Did we in our own strength confide,
Our striving would be losing;
Were not the right Man on our side,
The Man of God’s own choosing.
Dost ask who that may be?
Christ Jesus, it is he,
Lord Sabaoth, his name,
From age to age the same,
And he must win the battle.
And though this world, with devils filled,
Should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God has willed
His truth to triumph through us.
The prince of darkness grim—
We tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure,
For lo! His doom is sure;
One little word shall fell him.
It is always in the place of persistent prayer, as we call out to our heavenly Father and call in Christ the risen Lord to help us, that each victory in this war begins to be won. So, God help us to persist in our praying. God help us, then, to be found hanging on.