I am convinced more and more that prayer should not be our effort to persuade God to fulfill a desire of our heart but rather should be our effort to discover what God’s will is for any situation and, having aligned our hearts with his purposes, to then pray God’s will over the situation. Secondly, we must give up the notion that all prayers of faith are answered instantly. Sometimes they are, but that must not become our standard for prayer. There must be an element of endurance in many, and maybe most, prayers.

Jesus said, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believing, you will receive.” (Mt.21:22). Believing is an ongoing, continuous kind of verb. Jesus told us, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened” (Mt.7:7-8). In the original language, the verb tenses for ask, seek, and knock should actually be translated, “keep on asking, keep on seeking, and keep on knocking.” Somehow, in our microwave culture of instant gratification we feel like one or two really good prayers should be sufficient to get God to see things our way. When we ask, believing, we may have to continue to believe for a very long time. I listen to Christians every week who are angry with God or feel abandoned because they haven’t experienced their “answer to prayer” after praying for a few weeks or several months.

David was anointed by Samuel and promised the throne of Israel some 14 years before that promise came to pass and for most of those 14 years he was being hunted by Saul. Abraham and Sarah prayed for a child for decades before Isaac was born. Even after God told Elijah that it was going to rain, Elijah had to pray seven times before seeing any trace of a cloud. Daniel, who was highly esteemed in heaven, had to fast a pray for twenty-one days just to get some understanding of a dream. Faith for prayer needs to be faith that endures. We give up and count God as faithless too many times because the quality of endurance is not yet built into our character. Let me quote a few New Testament scriptures to underline my point:

For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. (Rom.15:4, emphasis added)

Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. (Ja. 1:2-4, emphasis added)

This calls for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God’s commandments and remain faithful to Jesus. (Rev.14:12, emphasis added)

There are numerous other verses that also call us to endurance. You must endure only if your deliverance takes a while in coming. Whether we recognize it or not, we live our lives in the midst of spiritual battle. The enemy tempts us and sows discouragement. He blinds us to what God has done in our lives and tells us that the proof of God’s love is totally contingent on us getting the one thing that we are pushing for while he opposes the answer to that prayer.   Our part is to fight and to fight in faith with prayer – sometimes for a very long while.

I like what Graham Cooke says about this. “We have to fight to receive in warfare. Too many people are willing to give up and just receive whatever they can get; a spiritual warrior contends to get the blessing God has for him. If we throw away our confidence, there is no breakthrough. The enemy knows this better than anyone which is why he constantly works to undermine the confidence of Christians…He (God) prolongs some situations in order to develop us at a much deeper level. It takes time to go deep…If the training is easy, then the player is weak” (Graham Cooke, Qualities of a Spiritual Warrior, p. 74-75).

Here is a hard truth. God is more concerned about building our character than answering our prayers. He will do both, but character gets his priority. Our challenge is to endure and continue to seek God’s will for our situation while we continue to pray with confidence. When endurance has done its work in our character then the answer to our prayer will come. God measures things by growth, not by time. When we have grown we move ahead. The time it takes is not the issue with God but the growth. We can fight him or we can join him. We can accuse him of being faithless and uncaring or we can ask him what he wants us to learn in any situation so that we may learn, grow, and then move ahead.

What have you given up on that requires endurance? You can always begin to ask again with a greater will to endure, knowing that God is always faithful – but on his timetable. God’s ways are revealed in creation. Diamonds are created when time and pressure work together. It is the same in our own lives. Be blessed today and choose to endure.