My brother and his wife and son are arriving in Atlanta tomorrow morning. Each week day I try to pray for Brian’s family and the people we met in Capetown last Christmas. The devil tempts us to think such praying has little purpose, but Jesus teaches us to pray and never give up.
The Lord reminded me of this instruction last spring when a missionary my son and I met in Benin, West Africa came to Atlanta. Taylor and I visited Benin a little over four years ago when my brother was living there. We had the great privilege of meeting many Christians in the rural villages of the country. Some of these brothers make it a daily habit to rise before day break to pray to the One who has all power and authority. I sometimes had chills run up and down my spine as these men that some would call poor and uneducated prayed with great boldness in languages I could not understand.
Sometimes I was asked to pray. Brian interpreted the requests, and I prayed boldly like my African brothers. Though I knew God heard our prayers, I did not see answers. Each night Taylor and I wrote a short summary of our day for Susan and the girls to read when we returned home. I often recorded the things we prayed about in the villages on a piece of paper in my Bible. For about a year, back home, I used this paper to pray for Benin and the brothers and sisters we met. So often I would fight the discouraging thought that such praying was pretty much a waste of time.
But this past spring, almost four years after our trip, we got to see one of the missionaries we met, and he gave me a message from a certain village. “Dana, the brothers wanted me to tell you that all the things you were asked to pray about when you visited have come to pass.” I hate to admit it, but I was a little stunned. If this message was true, some incredible things happened. We prayed for healing in places where witchcraft is the common method of curing sickness. We prayed for deliverance for those oppressed by the devil. We prayed for salvation to come to those who did not know Jesus. We prayed for believers to have the faith to withstand persecution. We prayed bold prayers.
These things I wonder: What if I had given up when I saw no instant result? What if I had not prayed persistently after I came back home? How many prayers has the Lord answered that I don’t even know about? Am I alive today because of the persistent prayers of the saints? … How often I have failed in persistence! How I need more faith! May the Son of Man find faith when He returns.
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’ … However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” Luke 18:1-8