The God Who Hears: 7 Days in Paul's Prayers From PrisonSample

Day 1: Never Give Up on God

For personal reasons, I can’t disclose what I went through during the toughest two and a half years of my life, but I faced a situation I never dreamed I would. And after trying to fix it on myself, I finally realized the only thing I could do was pray. So I did, crying out to God over and over. But he didn’t seem to be listening, and more than once, I thought, What’s the use? Either God doesn’t hear me, or I’m just not connecting with him. F.B. Meyer said, “The greatest tragedy of life is not unanswered prayer, but unoffered prayer.” Yet, on one of the darkest, most depressing days of my whole ordeal, when I was about to give up on even asking God to help, this thought hit me: If I give up on prayer, I give up on God.

As my trial persisted, I kept praying, asking for God’s will to be done in my life and the situation.

Then, all in one day, my prayer was answered in a far better way than I could have asked. And because of my experience throughout those two and a half years, I’ve come to understand the following two truths I believe are even more important than answered prayer:

1. Prayer is rarely a one-and-done deal. We aren’t praying to a genie whose lamp we rub who suddenly appears to grant whatever we wish. We’re praying to the God who wants us to pray to him about any situation or concern not once but repeatedly, not only to practice the discipline of prayer but to develop patience and grow our trust in him.

2. Prayer is not for God to do something for us but to allow him to do something in us. For so long, I hadn’t been ready for God to do what I wanted him to do for me because I wasn’t hearing what he first wanted to do in me. We can’t stop hoping or believing God is listening; we must listen to him, too. William McGill nailed it when he said, “The value of persistent prayer is not that [God] will hear us, but that we will hear him.”*

Not long after I entered this difficult season, someone I loved and trusted who knew what I was going through gave me a paperweight that still sits on my desk today. I saw it every time I sat down to spend time with God, and here are its three words as they appear:

Pray Trust Wait

There’s no way around it. I wanted to pray. I understood trust. But the wait part? I wanted to pass. Powerful prayer is the prevailing prayer. We pray. We trust. We wait. And then we repeat all three. Giving up on prayer wasn’t the way to go because as I continued to pray, I grew more in tune with waiting for God’s solution, believing it would come.

Read this carefully: The only failure in prayer is the failure to offer prayer. When you give up on prayer, you give up on God. The oldest temptation in the book goes back to the Garden of Eden when Satan tempted Adam and Eve to give up on God, and I don’t have to tell you how disastrous that was!

As an old man, Joshua bid farewell to the Israelite leaders saying, “Hold fast to the Lord your God, as you have until now” (Joshua 23:8). I’ve learned that when it comes to prayer, I need to hold on to God and his promises with bulldog tenacity! Don’t let go of your hope in God or the God of hope. No matter what problem you need solving, what question you need answered, or from what difficulty you need deliverance, keep praying to the God who will never fail you.

Father, I will never give up on prayer, for I will never give up on you! When all else around me is falling apart, coming unhinged, and vanishing beneath my feet, I will tie the rope of prayer around your feet and hold to your unchanging power and presence that always comes with and through prayer to the one who always keeps his promises. In the name of the One who taught us to pray and never give up, amen.

*William McGill Quotes, AZ Quotes, https://www.azquotes.com/author/28958-William_J_McGill.