Lighthouse Baptist Church
and Christian Academy

Praying over and over and over - focuses my attention. When you pray a prayer request over and over, it's not to remind God. He doesn't need to be reminded.

• It's to remind yourself who's the source of your answer, who's the source of all your needs.
• Persistent prayer is not blackmail where you finally beat up God until He gives up and answers your prayers. That's not what He's saying. Persistent prayer keeps you focused.

If every prayer you ever prayed was instantly answered, two things would be true.

1. In your life, prayer would become a weapon of destruction.
2. Two, if every prayer you're prayed was instantly answered, you'd never think about God. Because God would become a vending machine to you - put in the prayer, get out the candy. You don't think about vending machines. You don't think, "Look how well designed this vending machine is. Look at what great things it can give me." All you care about is the results. If you prayed and every time you prayed you instantly got results, all you'd think about is the blessing. God wants you to think about the Blessor. "I want you to focus on Me. I'll hold back the answer to force you to focus on Me. I am the source of everything you need."

Matthew 6:6 (Message paraphrase) "Here's what I want you to do. Find a quiet, secluded place so you won't be tempted to role play before God." He's saying when you're playing get alone by yourself. Have you noticed that when you pray in front of other people you pray differently? You role-play. You often take on another voice! "Our most gracious heavenly Father..." And the Father in heaven is going, "Who?"

Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God.

Romans 8:7

When you're caught up in your problems you're not thinking about God. You end of thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what He's doing.

Look to the Lord and ask Him for help.

Psalm 105

That's what persistent praying is. It focuses us on God.

A delayed answer gives me time to clarify exactly what I want. A delayed answer gives me time to refine my prayers - Do I really want it? As a pastor I've heard many, many prayers. The problem with your prayers is they're too vague.

You need to be more specific. The more specific you are in your prayers, the more dynamic they are, the more God can answer them.

• When you pray persistently, when you ask for something more than once from God, what it does is show what you really want. It shows your heart's desire. It shows that you really mean business.
• When you pray persistently to your heavenly Father, and you say something over, it separates deep longings from mere whims. It says, "God, I really care about this." It's not that God doesn't want to answer your prayers. He does. It's just that He wants you to be certain that that's what you really want.

The Bible says that when you don't know what exactly to pray for, that the Holy Spirit prays for you.

The Holy Spirit helps us in our distress. For we don't even know what we should pray for nor how we should pray, so the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that can't be expressed in words.

Romans 8:26 (New Living Translation)

• Have you ever been so depressed that you can't put your depression into words?
• Have you ever been so grieved and sorrowful, your heart was breaking so much, that you couldn't even speak it? You couldn't even say it or think it?
• Have you ever been so angry or so worried or so discouraged that mere verbal words just don't seem enough?

In those situations, God knows how you feel. And the Holy Spirit prays for you. And He prays those longings, those groanings inside that you can't even verbalize. He helps you clarify your requests.

Sometimes God waits to answer your prayer because He's helping you think through what's the real problem. Sometimes it's thinking through, "What do I really want here? ... What's the real goal here? What's the objective?" That's why he doesn't answer immediately.

Fire tests the purity of silver and gold but the Lord tests the purity of the heart.

Proverbs 17:3

God likes to test your heart. He strengthens it. He strengthens your faith by testing it.

How does God test your faith? His favorite way of testing you is delay. Are you familiar with this test? Have you ever been in a hurry when God wasn't? That's a frustrating place to be. But God's timetable is perfect. He's never early; He's never late.

Why? Why does God like to test our faith?

When your faith is tested your endurance has a chance to grow so let it grow for when your endurance is fully developed you will be strong in character and ready for anything.

James 1

You'll be mature. The only way you can grow to maturity - emotional maturity, spiritual maturity - is to have your faith tested. One of the ways He's going to test it is by delaying some answers to your prayers.

One of the tests of maturity is how long can you wait? That's a mark of maturity, the ability to wait.

• How long can a two year old wait? Not at all!
• How long can a teenager wait? The same length as a two year old! But there comes a point in your life where all of a sudden you grow up and you learn a principle called delayed gratification.

Delayed gratification means not everything happens on my timetable. Sometimes I have to wait for good things. It doesn't always happen immediately, instantly.

Take the step of faith as far as God leads you. When you get there, He'll tell you step two.

When you pray and you make a request of God almost always God wants to answer in a bigger and better way than you've prayed. Almost every time you make a prayer request, God wants to answer it in a bigger way and a better way. You say, "This is what I want," and God says, "I could do that but I would like to do it bigger and I would like to do it better."

The truth is, sometimes God denies your prayer requests because you're thinking and you're asking too small. It's true! Sometimes God denies your prayer request because you are thinking and you are asking too small. He wants to give you something bigger and He wants to give you something better. But first, He has to prepare you for the bigger and better answer. You're not ready for it yet. So God uses delays in answering prayer to help you grow, to help you get ready, to help prepare you for a bigger and better answer.

God can do much much more than anything we ask or imagine.

Ephesians 3:20

You've seen the bumper sticker that says, "Prayer changes things". That's true. It does. But prayer doesn't just change things; it changes you. While you're waiting, God is working. What's He working? He's working on you.

Prayer is not this tug of war with God. You think you're waiting on God to answer. God is waiting on you. Once you're developed, once you're matured, once you've obeyed, once you've done the things He wants done, Bam! The answer is going to come. You're not waiting on God. He's waiting on you. And once you've matured and developed and been prepared... The struggle isn't with God. It's primarily with ourselves. We have to get prepared to get blessed the way God wants to bless us.

God's timetable is perfect. He's never early. He's never late. He's always on time. He wants to answer in a way that's bigger and better than you thought so He's got to prepare you first.

The Bible says, "Be still in the presence of the Lord, and wait patiently for Him to act."

How do you know if you're really being patient? You don't get the wiggles. Little two year olds can't set still if they had to! They get the wiggles. Sometimes we get the spiritual wiggles while we're waiting for God to answer a prayer.

• We get nervous.
• We get restless.
• We want to jump up and do something.

God says, "Wait patiently. Be still. Watch Me act. Don't get restless, don't get nervous, don't get the wiggles, and don't try to take matters into your own hands."

Above all things, don't ever make the mistake Abraham made in the Old Testament of trying to be the answer to your own prayer. You do that and you're going to cause all kinds of problems. You can't be the answer to your own prayer. "I'll just make it happen."

One day God came to Abraham and said to him, "I'm going to make you the father of a great nation." There were only two problems: Abraham was 99 and he was childless. The Bible says that Abraham looked at his own body and said, "No way, Jose!" And he looked at his wife Sarah and said, "Double no way! It isn't gonna happen." Sarah was infertile. She had not had children. Abraham said, "I know. Plan B! I'll take my wife's maid and have sex with Hagar." She bore him a son and she named him Ishmael. Abraham goes, "Here's my answer to prayer! I've got a son at 99. His name is Ishmael." God said, "No, no. You missed the point. That's not my answer to prayer. That's your own answer to prayer. I've got a miracle boy whose coming and Sarah's going to be the mom. And you're going to name him Isaac." Isaac means laughter. When Sarah was first told that she was going to be pregnant the Bible says she laughed. That means she didn't believe God because at her age, if a woman discovered she was pregnant, she wouldn't laugh. She'd cry! She laughed and Abraham laughed and God had the last laugh. Isaac was born. Those two half brothers started an intense rivalry that we're still paying for today. They're called the Jews and the Arabs. That whole thing over there in the Middle East where they're killing each other is because Abraham tried to answer his own prayer request. He jumped the gun and tried to make it happen. He had sex with Hagar and Ishmael was born and as a result the Arabs and Jews have been at each other's throat for thousands and thousands of years. That's a family feud over there that's going on. And we're all paying for it.

Whenever you try to answer your own prayer, you're asking for trouble. He says wait patiently and watch God act.

Have faith. Trust God to hear and to answer.

I wait expectantly, trusting God to help, for He has promised.

Psalm 130:5

The bottom line really is do you believe the promises of God?

Does God keep His word or is God a liar. He says, "I will answer your prayers. Ask, ask. I will answer your prayers." Do you believe God or is He lying. Do you wait expectantly?

In Romans 8 God compares waiting on God to pregnancy. It's like an expectant mother. Romans 8:22-28 (Message paraphrase) "All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are really birth pangs. But it's not only around us, it's in us. The Spirit is arousing within us and we're also feeling these birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of our own are yearning for full deliverance - heaven. That's why waiting does not diminish us any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don't see what is enlarging us but the longer we wait the larger we become and the more joyful our expectancy. Meanwhile, the moment we get tired of waiting, God's Spirit is right along side, helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray it doesn't matter. He does our praying in us and for us, making our prayer out of wordless signs our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves. And God knows our pregnant condition and keeps us present before Himself. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something for good, because God knew what He was doing from the very beginning."

Luke 11 Jesus tells another parable like this parable of the persistent widow. Different stories same ending. He's saying, don't give up. At the end of the parable He says, "Ask and it shall be given, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be open." It literally means, keep on knocking. When you go up to somebody's house and knock on the door, do you knock just once? No, you knock multiple times. None of us have ever knocked once and figured nobody was home. That's ridiculous. You knock and keep knocking.

God wants you to be persistent. Have you ever called anybody on the phone and let it ring once? Of course not. You let it ring multiple times.

God says, Keep on seeking, keep on asking, and keep on knocking. God's word for you today if you're praying for something to change: Hang in there. While you're waiting, God is working.

Somebody came to Daniel Boone the famous frontiersman onetime and asked, "have you ever gotten lost in the wilderness?" He said, "No, I've never been lost. I've been bewildered for weeks at a time but I've never been lost." When you're bewildered you just keep on going.

Some of you may feel like that right now. You're bewildered.

• You're bewildered about your marriage: "I'm praying for it to get better but it's not getting any better."
• You're bewildered about your career: "Do I go up, down, change jobs, do this or that?"
• You're bewildered about your education: "Do I go to college? Do I stay home and go to trade school?"
• You're bewildered about relationships. You may feel like that widow - powerless and hopeless and you can't do anything to change your situation on your own. You're bewildered.

The point of the story is don't be discouraged. Don't give up. Look up. Don't despair. Turn to prayer. That's it - don't despair, turn to prayer.

When God doesn't answer your prayers you need to remember a couple very important truths.

First, God is in control and you're not. He knows better what you need than you do. There is no mountain too tall that He can't move it. There is no problem so big that He can't solve it. There is no storm so dark He cannot calm it. There is no sorrow so deep He cannot soothe it. God is in control and He has a plan. "The Lord says, 'No one who waits for my help will be disappointed.' Isaiah 49:23 (GN)

The second thing you need to remember is that God will honor your patience. Whether you ever receive the answer or not, He will honor and reward your patience. If not in this world, He will in the world to come, in eternity. You will be rewarded for your faith and your patience whether the answer ever comes or not.

Remember that God will sustain you while you are waiting. Psalm 55:22 "Pile your troubles on God's shoulders. He'll carry your load. He'll help you out." If He carried the weight of the world on His shoulders, He'll carry you through your tough times.