Don’t Give Up

Don’t Give Up

Never stop praying. 1 Thessalonians 5:17

IN AN AGE OF MICROWAVES, drive-thru windows, and web pages that frustrate us when they don’t load within seconds, we are hardly conditioned for persistent prayer. Our expectations are increasing; our attention spans are decreasing. Scripture and past experiences remind us to endure, but we seem to have redefined endurance to mean a matter of days rather than a matter of years. We want our prayer requests to look like our online transactions—short, simple, direct, and true to the buttons we’ve pushed. We bring a customer-service mindset into our relationship with God.

Our minds know how flawed this attitude is, but our reflexes still insist on it. And since God is not going to conform to our culture of immediate gratification, we must retrain ourselves to thrive in a culture of planting now and harvesting later. In other words, we need to avoid distractions and remain focused in our prayers. We have to remind ourselves that prayer and belief take time and that we inherit the promises of God through faith and patience (Hebrews 6:11-12). We need to recondition ourselves with tenacity.

Perhaps Paul’s words to the Thessalonians are instructing us to fill our days with prayer, to take advantage of the gaps in our schedules to lift up the needs of those around us, to breathe in and out our prayers while our minds and bodies are occupied with daily activities. That’s never a bad idea. But he is just as clearly encouraging us not to give up—to maintain prayer and faith until answers come, to endure the long journey of waiting, cultivating, and refining until our prayers are ready for harvest. To do that, we will need to refuse distractions and diversions. Natural thinking causes us to pray for a few days and assume God has said no when no answer comes. Kingdom thinking understands that the silence is a call to come closer, press in, keep asking, and hang on. Until we hear a clear “no” or “not now,” we are not to give up.

Spiritual fatigue is an enemy of faith. It lowers our expectations, droops our shoulders, and compels us to resign to the inevitable. But what seems inevitable to us is never inevitable to God. Never stop praying. Keep believing. And press ahead until you hear from him.

The great point is never to give up until the answer comes.