1. Prayer should be strenuously importunate. Not petitionary merely, or concentrated, or active alone, but importunate. For prayer is not meditation or communion only. Nor ought it to be merely submissive in tone, as the “quietist” ideal is. We need not begin with “Thy will be done” if we but end with it. Remember the stress that Christ laid on importunity. Strenuous prayer will help us to recover the masculine type of religion, and then our opponents will at least respect us.
2. The need of persevering, importunate prayer appears to some to be at variance with the faith which knows that it has received what it asks (Mar_11:24). One of the mysteries of the
Divine life is the harmony between the gradual and the sudden, immediate full possession and slow imperfect appropriation. And so here persevering prayer appears to be the school in which the soul is strengthened for the boldness of faith. And with the diversity of operations of the Spirit there may be some in whom faith takes more the form of persistent waiting, while to others triumphant thanksgiving appears the only proper expression of the assurance of having been heard.
(1) Importunity is necessary for two reasons. First, because prayer is not only the satisfaction of our needs but the discharge of a duty and the test of inward loyalty towards God, the grace of perseverance is essential to its practice. In the searching words of the Serious Call on daily early prayer, William Law points out that prayer is not a question of moods and fancies, but of duty and discipline, although the sense of duty and the discipline are energized by love.
Even dull and spiritless prayer, if only it be faithfully persevered in, accustoms the soul to Christ’s Cross; disciplines it against self, teaches it humility; teaches it in the hidden way of the faith. If our prayers were always clear, if they never lacked unction, feeling, fervour, we should feed all our lives through on a milk diet and lack the discipline of dry bread; we should seek only the sweets and pleasures we could feel, instead of persisting after self-sacrifice and death; we should be as the folk whom Jesus reproached because they followed Him not for His doctrine but for the loaves and fishes. Reject not the exercise of prayer, then, even though your prayer appear spiritless, dull, distracted. Endure to be bored patiently, so it be for the love of God. Would you waste your time in beating away the flies that buzz around your ears? Suffer them rather to buzz, and use yourself to go on with your work as though they were miles away. [Fenelon.]
When the self-indulgent neighbour endeavoured to escape the trouble of providing his friend with three loaves, it was selfishness and sloth that created the delay and made the difficulty. When the unjust judge over and over again slighted the appeal of the injured widow, it was only reckless carelessness and indifference to the claims of right and duty that led him to keep her waiting. But when our heavenly Father seems to act, in some respects, as they did, and the longed-for answer does not appear to come, it is not selfishness or carelessness, but love, that induces the delay, in order that the value of the blessing may be increased by importunity. [Note: Canon Hay Aitken, The Divine Ordinance of Prayer, 99.]
(2) “Importunity,” writes Bishop Wilson, “makes no change in God, but it creates in us such dispositions as God thinks fit to reward”; and thus continuance in prayer becomes a test of character. To give up the special request may mean distrust of God, or impatience, or indolence, or even some secret tendency to veiled rebellion against His will.
A child who had wandered from a mountain road, in the summer of 1900, lost his life among “the Brecon Beacons”. Had he walked only a few yards farther from the spot where his body at last was found, he would have seen his home in the valley just below the mountain, and have been easily guided to the pathway descending to it. He paused in his weariness at a point where nothing met his eye but the bare hills around. In that pathetic incident is there not a parable of much spiritual loss? The gift that might have been cultivated, the blessing that might have been won, the grace by which weakness might have been transformed into strength, the temptation that might have been subdued, the work that might have been so useful in the Church’s cause, lost at a point where only one more effort was needed to secure it. Midway between “the spirit,” with its upward aspirations, and “the flesh” in our fallen state, with its downward tendencies, there lies “the soul,” the scene of momentous decisions whether to fall under “the mind of the flesh,” which is death, or under “the mind of the spirit,” empowered by the Divine Spirit, which is “life and peace”. In the years of our conflict, the Lord’s solemn charge to “watch and pray” is a summons to self-discipline and importunity in prayer, but the charge may be linked with the gracious promise by which He crowns endurance with victory: “In your patience ye shall win your souls”. [Note: A. J. Worlledge, Prayer, 205.]
I sat in a quiet corner unseen, with locked hands and the tears dripping on them, pleading, pleading, God would use him as the instrument to draw those men that night. Deeper and deeper grew the feeling as he told, quietly and briefly, the story of what he had seen and heard, and what he believed God was doing in Wales and questioning was He going to do it in England? My pleading had become a veritable agony; the Holy Spirit’s brooding presence an awesome thing in its solemn intensity, when suddenly he said something that held me and drew me.
I lifted my head and listened—was transfixed by his face and words—stopped my pleading and followed him intently. Once he looked uneasily towards me. I did not know what he meant. His words were burning with fire and beauty. Then something happened; he was swung off in another direction. Men caught their breath, the tension lessened, he sat down, and though every soul was deeply moved—scores of their eyes were wet—yet the tongues of flame were held back; they came not that night. And we sat, two sad and disappointed creatures; and when at last the meeting was over and he came down from the platform and reaching my side, he seized my arm fiercely, saying, “You were praying for me tonight, were you not?” I nodded. “And you stopped in the middle of my speech. Oh, why did you, why did you? All the power went out of me, I could feel it go, and could not imagine what was the matter with me, till I glanced at you and saw you listening. Never, never do that again. To think we might have been in the thick of the Revival this very night, if you had been faithful.” [Note: Estelle W. Stead, My Father, 280.]
