Persevering in Prayer

Luke 18:1-8

The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching

July 13, 2025

It is in one sense easy to pray.  For praying is in its essence just being open with God and open to God, and anyone can do that if they’re of a mind to.

It is also easy to pray because praying rewards those who pray.  By God’s grace we have access to God, but only by our praying does God gain access to us in the deepest way – the way that enables God to do in us and through us things He couldn’t otherwise.  To pray is so to engage with the living God that it changes us for the better and makes us better agents of positive change.  And, since the results from any prayer come from the One who hears it, and not from the one who says it, we can count on a big payoff whenever we pray even if our praying is faltering or faulty in some respect.

It is then easy to pray, but it is hard to keep praying.  For praying continually puts us in touch with the heart-wrenching delays in the fulfillment of the very hope our praying inspires.  Praying thereby exposes us to the fierce temptation to grow disappointed, and even disillusioned, with God.

All this makes persevering in prayer a challenge.  That’s why, Luke says, Jesus told today’s parable.  By it Jesus meant to encourage His followers “to pray always and not to lose heart” – ever a real possibility.

Prayer therefore requires a steadfast commitment, a persistent investment of time and a dogged self-discipline in it even when the enjoyment of it is gone and nothing appears to come of it.  Praying takes a steadfast tenacity, born of faith, not to give up on it but to stick to it with determined dedication.

In his book on prayer Tim Keller cites a pastor who likens the practice of praying to mining as he knew it in his native land of Norway.  Mining there always involves digging into hard rock.  This takes place in two very distinct stages.  The first is a long, hard, tedious effort of drilling tunnels, a demanding task requiring painstaking, persevering exertion.  The second stage is quick, easy, fun and very impressive.  You just put some explosive into the tunnel, light the fuse, step back and enjoy the show, full of big booms and rocks flying everywhere.  It’s literally a blast, and involves no labor or waiting to speak of.  There’s just an immediate, thrilling, glorious display of power.

Would that every moment of prayer were like that!  But a lot of prayer is as unexciting as drilling a tunnel through hard rock. Only faith in the promised payoff sustains persisting in the process.

I have to think it was hard for the parable’s widow to keep after that “judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people”.  While she might have been a pain in his neck, he must have been like a knife in her heart every time he dismissed her as a nobody and ignored her plea as unworthy of his concern.  Yet, wearing him down was her only hope.  So she swallowed her pride, put on her inner armor, and “kept coming to him” day after day after day until he couldn’t take it anymore and vindicated her against her “opponent” just to get rid of her.

Like the two parables we reflected on last Sunday, this is a parable of contrast.  It isn’t meant to depict how God is, but to jolt us into recollecting how different God is:  God is, in fact, the very opposite of the “unjust judge”!

If that judge finally vindicated the widow, will not then the Lord of love “grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night” and vindicate them in their seemingly foolish faith?  Jesus responds to that question with a resounding “Of course, God will!” – an affirmation so strongly felt by Jesus that He claimed God would do it “quickly”, though by now His people have been waiting for it for two thousand years.

By the way, I suspect the widow was so unrelentingly pestering because she was so vehemently exasperated with enduring the wrong the judge’s apathy perpetuated.  I see in her an adamant refusal to tolerate inequity and a passionate, impatient zeal to see things set right.  We’d do well to remember her example.

Sometimes, when we must persevere in prayer, we think we’re waiting on God; but maybe God is waiting on us!  For God delegates much of His work to His people.  Praying therefore can never be a substitute for obeying Him and enacting His love and justice for Him.  Though we cannot do more than pray until we have prayed, we must often do more than pray after we have prayed.

A father in the Midwest tells of how one cold winter day the whole family had hunkered down into their snug, warm house – except for six-year-old Jonathan who’d insisted on playing out in the snow.  As Dad happened by an upstairs window, he noticed Jonathan had made a giant snowball in the yard across the street and was rolling it over to their family’s front yard.  Dad called over Mom and the other three kids to join him in watching the very entertaining Jonathan as he struggled to get his big snowball up and over the curb.  They snickered as he, having failed to push it up onto the sidewalk, backed up ten feet to lay into it with a running start, only to bounce off it and fall backwards.  Undaunted, he then tried to lift it up and over the curb using a board for leverage.  They chuckled when he kicked his snowball in frustration.  Then he stopped, dropped to his knees and folded his hands together in prayer.  His family upstairs had to bow their heads too in empathetic prayer, until they heard Jonathan’s nine-year-old sister Jeanna run off, scamper down the stairs, rush outside and help God answer her brother’s prayer.  The girl realized you’re not really interacting with God in prayer if you’re not becoming willing to act for God in concrete deeds!

The best praying is less a matter of saying things right than of following up on your prayer right.  Though our words in prayer may be awkward and wayward, if they inspire us to righteous and gracious deeds, our praying could hardly be improved upon.  In the best praying we allow God to move us to bring about His good will.

There are three means by which God expects the followers of Jesus to bring about His will: by thinking, by working and by praying.  Each is essential. If we fail to think, some good things God wants to happen won’t happen; if we fail to work, other things won’t happen; and if we fail to pray, still others won’t.  Prayer is one of the three forms of our collaboration with God.  And as Augustine said, while without God we cannot, without us God will not!

Let us then not lose heart but pray without ceasing – remembering that persevering prayer makes us better versions of ourselves and thereby those who make life better for others.