“I believe that it is impossible to grasp all the different forms of prayer without great purity of heart and soul. There are as many forms of prayer as there are states of soul. A person pays in a certain manner when cheerful and in another when weighed down by sadness or a sense of hopelessness. When one is flourishing spiritually, prayer is different from when one is oppressed by the extent of one’s struggles.”
– John Cassian
Philippians 4:6 Be anxious for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.
Are you too polite with how you pray to God? When praying for a certain cause, emergency, or even praying that God would bring a loved one to the faith, do you pray for it a few times and then just stop praying for that thing? Some reasons we might give for halting our prayers for certain things are, “God knows about this,” or “There are 7 billion more people for him to worry about, and I don’t want to be a pest.” While it is true that God remembers your prayers, and that he even knows what you will pray about before you fold your hands, that doesn’t change the fact God, the creator of the universe, has given you an open line of communication directly to his ear and tell you, “pray continually” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
Too often we think that God gets annoyed with us the way we get annoyed with that person who keeps reminding us about what we told them we would do. God isn’t going to one day thunder down from heaven saying, “SHUT UP! You’ve already said this, you’re just repeating what I promised I would do.” God will never say something like that. We know this because Jesus, who is the Son of God, and one with God the Father, gave us a story for the purpose of teaching us, “that [we] should pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1). In the NIV translation of the Bible this story is given the title “The Parable of the Persistent Widow” (Luke 18:1-8).
At first glance it seems odd that Jesus would use this parable to teach us to be persistent in prayer. We’re told of a woman who has been wronged in some way and she is going daily before the town judge demanding that he dole out proper justice. The judge in this story didn’t find this woman’s persistence endearing, he was annoyed by her. The judge viewed this woman the way you or I might treat that prolonged pain in the back that won’t go away; at first you think you can suffer through it, but when it doesn’t go away then you need to act on it and go to the doctor. Eventually this pest of a widow annoyed the judge so much, that in order to silence her pleas for justice he did his job!
Supplication is persisting in prayer for what you want. It not only reveals your passion, it also will create change. Manasseh, who was one the Kings in Judah was taken from his kingdom and held captive in Babylon. This would have been difficult for him, so he responded by doing four things to create the change that he wanted to see. He sought the Lord and repented of his sins. In addition, he prayed and persisted in entreating God for him to be restored to his Kingdom and God did it for him. Persist in prayer for what you want, God will do it.
Life Application: Pray earnestly and persistently for the change you want to see.
Prayer: Dear Lord, help me to persist in prayer until you answer. Help me not to get weary and give up when I do not get a response to my prayers immediately. I pray for your peace in knowing that all things are working for my good. In Jesus name, amen.
DailyRowe Devotional 
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