A few days ago I was in a sandwich shop during the lunch-hour rush. The line to order snaked out the front door and onto the sidewalk. As I stood at the pick-up counter a woman in front of me came unglued over the wait-time and unleashed her furor on an overwhelmed teenage girl working behind the register. The scene ended with the woman storming out of the restaurant without her lunch.
Americans don’t like to wait. I’m as guilty as anybody. (But if you ever see me berate a store employee I hope you’ll be kind enough to thump me on the head). We demand fast food, overnight shipping, instant access, and high speed Internet. If companies don’t meet these standards we take our business elsewhere. Many of us have come to believe that if we are forced to wait then something has obviously gone wrong. I can’t help but wonder if we’ve unwittingly taken this mindset into our prayer lives.
How many of us have prayed for something and then given up when God didn’t answer our prayer as quickly as we’d hoped?
The Scriptures make it clear that we’ll not only have to wait, but we’ll often need to ask repeatedly for the things we pray for. When Luke wrote about the Parable of the Persistent Widow he began with these words,
“And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” (Luke 18:1)
In this passage, Jesus goes on to tell a parable of a widow woman who petitioned a judge for justice against her adversary. Keep in mind that as a widow this woman had no social standing or resources to speak of. Initially, the judge denied her request. The text says the judge “neither feared God nor respected man.” It’s safe to say this judge wasn’t a nice guy. But the woman kept asking. And asking. And asking.
And what happened?
“For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.” (Luke 18:4-5).
Jesus’ point in teaching this parable was to encourage persistence in prayer and to guard against negligence in asking. To be sure, there are times when God answers prayer quickly and it’s a beautiful thing when He does. But that’s not always the case. God’s children should expect to ask repeatedly. If we approach God like we approach the counter at a sandwich shop and expect our requests to be delivered immediately we will be sorely disappointed and disenchanted with God. Also, we’ll likely quit praying.
I’ll leave you with a few words that Jesus spoke on the subject of prayer. I think the HCSB version says it best, “Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened for you.” (Matthew 7:7)
