Boy, I hope it rains today. God, please send us rain; Amen.
If the rains come after that short prayer I would hesitate to claim that God was honoring my petition on the face of that single request. If the rain did not come does that mean that God didn’t hear me at all? If I give up after that, I will never know. If I don’t give up, He will answer.
Really! God answers prayers. Even impossible prayers. In fact, He loves to answer the impossible ones because it means you will have to have more faith in Him to believe that it will happen. What are you praying for? Keep going, keep praying and He will answer.
In Luke 18: 1-8, Jesus gives an example (parable) of the power of persistent prayer. A widow, with no chance of getting what she wanted from a cantankerous old judge, persisted in making her request to the point she wore the judge down and he capitulated. Then Jesus makes an incredible statement about the relationship of her persistence to what our prayer lives should look like.
Then the Lord said, “ Hear what the unjust judge said. And shall God not avenge His own elect who cry out day and night to Him, though He bears long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?” Luke 18:6-8 (NKJV).
He is effectively saying that we should petition Him day and night. He starts the chapter by saying that we should pray and not faint. In other words, never give up because the minute we give up we shut down a legacy of future events God wants to honor. How many stories have we heard about the small church that started in someone’s home and became a huge influential church of power in its community? What if the prayers stopped at the beginning stages? I’m not sure what God would have done but there are many dreams in the heads of people that probably could have become churches; terminated prayer reminders that could have become great businesses; incomplete petitions that could have produced networks of powerful people.
If God is “able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we ask or think, according to the power that works in us” Ephesians 3:20 (NKJV), why would we ever want to shut down the power that works in us, by just quitting?
So, if you’re praying for rain, keep praying until God reigns down. He’s waiting to hear from you.
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