"Pray Hard"
Luke 18:1-8
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Series: "The Circle Maker," by Mark Batterson

Introduction: Today we are in week two of our 4 week series on Mark Batterson’s book “The Circle Maker.” Last week we talked about God wanting us to dream big, and pray big. However, we need to understand that the dreams that we have need to come from God to us. As we understand God’s will for our lives, and what God wants to do in and through our lives, we then pray for this believing that God will answer our prayers.

God wants us to believe that we can achieve big things, because we have a big God walking with us. God wants us to believe that we can accomplish whatever is within God’s will in spite of what might seem like limited resources. God wants to work in and through our lives for the purpose of bringing glory to His name.

Today we are going to look at how God wants us to pray hard!

I. Being Persistent- (Luke 18:1-8)

a. The habit of persistence- More than a decade ago a man named

Anders Ericsson and some of his colleagues at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music did a study with the musicians. They divided the violinists into three groups: worldclass soloists, good violinists, and those who were unlikely to play professionally. All of them started playing at roughly the same age and practiced about the same amount of time until the age of eight. At this point there was a divergence in their practice habits. The researchers found that by the age of twenty, the AVERAGE players had only put in about four thousand hours of practice time, the GOOD violinists totaled about eight thousand hours, and the elite performers practiced for ten thousand hours! While innate talent has something to do with it, effort had an even greater effect on making someone really good.

As Neurologist Daniel Levitin says: “The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again…No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time…”

Should prayer be any different? Should we expect to be expert prayers and yet not develop a habit of persistent prayer? Habits need to be cultivated and practiced. Prayer is no different. This is what we talked about last week when we talked about praying through. It isn’t about praying just once. It is about praying over and over again. Prayer is a discipline that needs to be developed; a skill to be practiced. The bigger the dream, the harder you must pray!

b. Persistently praying the promises of God- Take the widow we just

read about. Luke 18:1 says, “Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.” This parable Jesus told is for the purpose of teaching us that prayer is something we should do with persistence. Jesus uses the example of a woman persistently bugging a judge to get justice against her adversary. Because of her persistence the judge granted her justice! She got what was right to come to her because of her persistence. Then Jesus says in verse 7: “And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?”

Another example of this is Elijah. During the prophet Elijah’s life there was a drought. This drought lasted three years. Then the Lord promised Elijah that He would send rain, but it would require Elijah to pray. So Elijah climbed to the top of Mount Carmel, fell on his face, and prayed for rain. Six times Elijah told his servant to look toward the sea, but each time there was no sign of rain! This is when most of us give up. We have prayed a few times, nothing seems to happen, we doubt God will act, and so we stop. But Elijah didn’t stop. He prayed a seventh time. In essence, Elijah was saying, “I will not move from here until God answers.” After the seventh time Elijah’s servant saw a small cloud.

What if Elijah had stopped after six times? The obvious answer is that Elijah and his people would not have experienced the miracle of rain. But Elijah did pray through, and God came through! The sky turned black and the raindrops fell for the first time in three years.

The reason many of us give up too soon is that we feel like we have failed if God doesn’t answer our prayer. That isn’t failure. THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN FAIL IS IF YOU STOP PRAYING.

II. God’s Favor on us- (Psalm 84:11, 23:6)

a. Standing on the promises of God- The Bible tells us that the Lord is

watching over His word to perform it. There is nothing that God loves more than keeping His promises. He is actively watching and waiting for us to simply take Him at His word. He promises to forgive us when we confess, but we must pray. He promises to not leave us nor forsake us, but we must pray. He promises to take care of our needs, but we must pray.

Praying hard is standing on the promises of God. And when we stand on His word, God stands by His word. His word is His bond. We sometimes think that we are asking too much of God, but if it is in accordance to His will, it is never too much. As Psalm 84:11 says, “No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly.” A good prayer to pray persistently is for us to walk uprightly.

Don’t think that God is holding out or holding back. It is not in God’s nature to withhold any good thing from us. He doesn’t bless us in our disobedience, but He will definitely bless us in our obedience! If we take God at His work, we will joyfully discover that God wants to bless us far more than we imagine. And God’s capacity to give is far greater than our capacity to receive.

Listen to the first half of Psalm 23:6, “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life…” When we walk in a right relationship with God, God will make sure that His goodness and mercy will follow us; be ever upon us. How could we ever doubt God’s intentions once we really come to know who God is and what God wants to do? God reminds us time and time again of His promises; His promises which He wants to fulfill for you and me!!

b. The favor of God- I hope you agree with me that the greatest

moments in life, are the moments when God intervenes on our behalf, and blesses us way beyond what we expect or deserve. When this happens, it is a humble reminder of God’s sovereignty. It is when God bestows His favor on us.

As I was writing this, I stopped to think of one of these moments. The first thought that came to my mind was when Tami and I got pregnant with Tyler. We had been trying to get pregnant for about 2 years, with no success. Then, out of the blue, in the midst of moving to Colorado, setting up our house, getting established at my first pastoral ministry, in a time you would think would be very stressful, we found out Tami was pregnant. Tami and I immediately thanked God, because we knew that this was God’s favor bestowed on us!

When God’s favor comes upon us, it doesn’t mean that we won’t still go through challenging periods. It was very challenging to find out month after month Tami wasn’t pregnant. It took great perseverance to continue to pray for this in the midst of it not happening. But when you pray in this way you begin to pray like it depends on God. The more it doesn’t happen, the more we have to pray, and the harder we have to pray. And as we patiently wait, we will come to experience God’s miracles taking place.

III. The Promptings of the Holy Spirit- (Acts 12)

a. The answer as we pray- Sometimes we are led to pray, and while we

are praying God is working on the prayer to be answered. There is a great example of this in the book of Acts, chapter 12. In this chapter King Herod decided he was going to arrest many Christians, including Peter. The church started to pray for Peter’s release. The night before Herod was going to bring Peter to trial, while Peter was sleeping between 2 soldiers, an angel of the Lord appeared, woke Peter up, and caused the chains to fall off his wrists. The angel told Peter to follow him, which he did, but Peter didn’t know what was really happening. Peter thought he was just seeing a vision. Peter followed the angel past 2 guards and the angel then opened the iron gate leading to the city. At this Peter knew that this was all the Lord’s doing in answer to the church praying for him. Once he realized this he went to the house where the church would be praying. Let me pick it up for you in Acts 12:13, “Peter knocked at the outer entrance, and a servant named Rhoda came to answer the door. ¹⁴ When she recognized Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed she ran back without opening it and exclaimed, “Peter is at the door!” ¹⁵ “You’re out of your mind,” they told her. When she kept insisting that it was so, they said, “It must be his angel.” ¹⁶ But Peter kept on knocking, and when they opened the door and saw him, they were astonished. ¹⁷ Peter motioned with his hand for them to be quiet and described how the Lord had brought him out of prison.”

While the church was still praying for Peter to be released from prison, Peter was standing at the door of the house where they were praying!! They had been prompted by the Spirit to pray, and the answer to their prayer came to them while they were still praying. They weren’t expecting God to answer in that way. They probably thought that Peter would go to trial, and there would be a long fight, and in time, Peter would be released.

In the Old Testament, when the people were hungry as they wandered in the wilderness, Moses prayed to God for food. What did God do? He provided manna for them. As God told Moses, the manna would come down from heaven at the start of each day, and they would have ‘just enough’ for that day. The manna was a daily reminder of their daily dependence on God./ We are prompted to pray, and God provides, but too often we don’t think that God provides enough, and because of this we miss that God has answered our prayer!

b. Prayer is hard- We are talking in today’s sermon about praying hard,

but we forget that prayer can be hard. It is hard to pray for something that doesn’t exist yet. It is hard to pray when there doesn’t seem to be any answers. It is hard to pray when things don’t make sense, or when your life isn’t working out very well.

One reason many people get frustrated spiritually is that they feel like it should get easier to do the will of God. The will of God does not get easier the longer you are a Christian. The reason it doesn’t get easier, is because the more you understand about God’s will, and prayer, and how they relate together, the more you realize you have to pray. You realize that you have to pray hard for God’s will to come about.

God will keep putting you in situations that stretch your faith, and as your faith stretches, so do your dreams. As God brings about each dream, you start to have bigger and bigger dreams. Therefore, the will of God actually gets harder and more complicated. But complications, and God’s answers to these complications are evidence of God’s blessings!

When you hear the word complication, what do you think? Many people think that complications are bad, but this is not always true. There are actually good complications. When Tami and I got married, our lives became more complicated, because we had to learn how to live together, and work together, and compromise our lives for each other. And when we had children our lives got even more complicated. But I would not trade these complications for anything!

This is true of our spiritual life as well. Blessings not only bless us, but they also complicate our lives. But they complicate our lives in ways that God wants our lives to be complicated. When I became pastor of this church, it was a blessing, but it also has its complications. When we pray for God’s will to happen, and it happens, that opens a door for God to use us all the more. So our prayer should be: “Lord, complicate my life.”

For example, I have recently had the conversation with a couple of people who told me they prayed to God for patience. We know that this is definitely in God’s will for our lives, because the Bible often talks about us needing patience; patience is a fruit of the Spirit. But, to grow in the ability to have patience means that you have to go through situations that will potentially cause you to be impatient. So this prayer, and the blessing of God giving us patience, actually complicates our life and makes it more challenging!

IV. Unanswered prayer is an answer- (Deuteronomy 29:29)

a. When God answers “no”- Some of the hardest moments in life are

when you’ve prayed hard, but the answer is no. Usually, if we don’t get what we pray for, we think God isn’t listening, or that God didn’t answer our prayer. But we have to remember that “no” is an answer. I know that I answer “no” to my kids’ requests all the time. Why do I answer no? Because it isn’t the right time for them, or it isn’t the right experience for them, or because they need to earn it, or because there is something else they need to be doing!

The question I have for you is this: Do you trust that God is for you even when He doesn’t give you what you ask for? Do you trust that God’s ways are better than your ways and God’s understanding better than yours?

Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” There are secret things, some mysteries in life that won’t be revealed to us until we get to heaven. I don’t understand why God won’t heal my back. I don’t understand why some people, who I think would be great parents, can’t get pregnant, while others who aren’t good parents do. There are many questions that come to us because of prayers that are answered “no” by God.

However, sometimes prayers that God answers “no” to, provide opportunities for God to answer “yes” to something else. Ruth Graham, the wife of the great evangelist Billy Graham, says that she almost got married twice before she said “yes” to Billy Graham. Both of them would agree that God’s answer of “no” to others, was in the end a great blessing!

b. Just in Time- All of us love miracles. However, we don’t like being in

situations where a miracle is needed. You don’t want to find yourself between an Egyptian army and the Red Sea. We want God to provide for our need before we even know we need it. But sometimes God tells us to “wait.” Sometimes God leads us to a place where we have nowhere to turn but to Him; our only option is to trust Him. So why does God wait until the very last second to make His move?

Praying hard is trusting that God will fight our battles for us. Praying hard means that we take our hands off the challenges we face and put them in the hands of God. Praying hard is believing that God can handle what we give to Him. And the truth is, He can! The hard thing is to keep our hands off of them once we have given them over to God.

We have a sanctuary that can hold over 200, but each Sunday we have 50-60 people. I can’t solve this problem on my own, I need you, and we all need God. We come up short about $2,000-$3000 in our collection every month. I can’t make up that difference. These are challenges that I must, we must hand over to God. But once we hand it over, we must PRAY HARD!

The exciting thing is to see God answer our prayers when we pray hard; when we pray persistently. Sometimes God needs to take us to the brink of death for us to admit we need Him. Sometimes God will close doors so that we have to trust Him to open the ones that need to be opened; doors we wouldn’t have even thought of opening had we not had the other doors close.

Conclusion: Remember the words of Daniel Levitin: “No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time (than 10,000 hours of practice).” How often do you pray? When you pray, do you pray with great energy and faith, or do you just go through the motions? Do you pray persistently, or do you give up easily? Do you allow the challenges of life to cause you to trust God all the more, or do you let them cause you to question and doubt God? I encourage you to pray persistently, pray with faith, PRAY HARD. Amen.