On persevering prayer: “I look at a stone cutter hammering away at a rock a hundred times without so much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101st blow it splits in two. I know it was not the one blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” -Unknown
Do you give up easily when you don’t see the answers to what you pray for? Does that cause you to doubt the effectiveness of prayer, or that maybe the Lord doesn’t want you to have what you pray for?
The more we pray, the more Satan will tremble…and the more he will work to instill doubt and confusion about the things you pray for. The longer you pray for something, the longer he will try to tell you to give up, because you don’t see a result. Don’t let him win.
That quote above about the stone cutter really connected with me. It’s so easy to get discouraged in our “I want it now” culture that we sometimes feel like giving up and moving on to something else because we don’t see a result.
Yet you do not have because you do not ask. -James 4:2
Pray without ceasing, as Paul exhorts the Thessalonians to do (1 Thess. 5:17). Jesus Himself explains, through the parable of the persistent widow, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart (Luke 18:1).
As agents, as believers, we must believe in our hearts that He hears the cries of His children, and is working in the background to lay things out for us. We must truly know in our hearts that if we don’t pray, we’re not laying down tracks for His power to come our way.
Don’t lose heart. Think of the stone cutter. Each prayer is laying the tracks and preparing that stone before you to crack…but not if you stop.
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