CHRIST puts importunity as a distinguishing characteristic of true
praying. We must not only pray, but we must pray with great urgency,
with intentness and with repetition. We must not only pray, but we must
pray again and again. We must not get tired of praying. We must be
thoroughly in earnest, deeply concerned about the things for which we
ask, for Jesus Christ made it very plain that the secret of prayer and
its success lie in its urgency. We must press our prayers upon God.
In a parable of exquisite pathos and simplicity, our Lord taught not
simply that men ought to pray, but that men ought to pray with full
heartiness, and press the matter with vigorous energy and brave hearts.
“And He spake a parable unto them to the end that they ought always to
pray, and not to faint; saying, There was in a city, a judge, which
feared not God, and regarded not man: and there was a widow in that
city; and she came oft unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary.
And he would not for a while: but afterwards he said within himself,
Though I fear not God, nor regard man; yet because this widow troubleth
me, I will avenge her, lest she wear me out by her continual coming. And
the Lord said, Hear what the unrighteous judge saith. And shall not God
avenge His elect, which cry to Him day and night, and He is
longsuffering over them? I say unto you, that He will avenge them
speedily. Howbeit when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the
earth?”
This poor woman’s case was a most hopeless one, but importunity brings
hope from the realms of despair and creates success where neither
success nor its conditions existed. There could be no stronger case, to
show how unwearied and dauntless importunity gains its ends where
everything else fails. The preface to this parable says: “He spake a
parable to this end, that men ought always to pray and not to faint.” He
knew that men would soon get faint-hearted in praying, so to hearten us
He gives this picture of the marvellous power of importunity.
The widow, weak and helpless, is helplessness personified; bereft of
every hope and influence which could move an unjust judge, she yet wins
her case solely by her tireless and offensive importunity. Could the
necessity of importunity, its power and tremendous importance in prayer,
be pictured in deeper or more impressive colouring? It surmounts or
removes all obstacles, overcomes every resisting force and gains its
ends in the face of invincible hindrances. We can do nothing without
prayer. All things can be done by importunate prayer.
That is the teaching of Jesus Christ.
Another parable spoken by Jesus enforces the same great truth. A man at
midnight goes to his friend for a loan of bread. His pleas are strong,
based on friendship and the embarrassing and exacting demands of
necessity, but these all fail. He gets no bread, but he stays and
presses, and waits and gains. Sheer importunity succeeds where all other
pleas and influences had failed.
The case of the Syrophenician woman is a parable in action. She is
arrested in her approaches to Christ by the information that He will not
see any one. She is denied His presence, and then in His presence, is
treated with seeming indifference, with the chill of silence and
unconcern: she presses and approaches, the pressure and approach are
repulsed by the stern and crushing statement that He is not sent to her
kith or kind, that she is reprobated from His mission and power. She is
humiliated by being called a dog. Yet she accepts all, overcomes all,
wins all by her humble, dauntless, invincible importunity. The Son of
God, pleased, surprised, overpowered by her unconquerable importunity,
says to her: “O, woman, great is thy faith; be it unto thee even as thou
wilt.” Jesus Christ surrenders Himself to the importunity of a great
faith. “And shall not God avenge His own elect which cry day and night
unto Him, though He bear long with them?”
Jesus Christ puts ability to importune as one of the elements of prayer,
one of the main conditions of prayer. The prayer of the Syrophenician
woman is an exhibition of the matchless power of importunity, of a
conflict more real and involving more of vital energy, endurance, and
all the higher elements than was ever illustrated in the conflicts of
Isthmia or Olympia.
The first lessons of importunity are taught in the Sermon on the
Mount—“Ask, and it shall be given; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and
it shall be opened.” These are steps of advance—“For every one that
asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that
knocketh, it shall be opened.”
Without continuance the prayer may go unanswered. Importunity is made up
of the ability to hold on, to press on, to wait with unrelaxed and
unrelaxable grasp, restless desire and restful patience. Importunate
prayer is not an incident, but the main thing, not a performance but a
passion, not a need but a necessity.
Prayer in its highest form and grandest success assumes the attitude of
a wrestler with God. It is the contest, trial and victory of faith; a
victory not secured from an enemy, but from Him who tries our faith that
He may enlarge it: that tests our strength to make us stronger. Few
things give such quickened and permanent vigour to the soul as a long
exhaustive season of importunate prayer. It makes an experience, an
epoch, a new calendar for the spirit, a new life to religion, a
soldierly training. The Bible never wearies in its pressure and
illustration of the fact that the highest spiritual good is secured as
the return of the outgoing of the highest form of spiritual effort.
There is neither encouragement nor room in Bible religion for feeble
desires, listless efforts, lazy attitudes; all must be strenuous,
urgent, ardent. Inflamed desires, impassioned, unwearied insistence
delight heaven. God would have His children incorrigibly in earnest and
persistently bold in their efforts. Heaven is too busy to listen to
half-hearted prayers or to respond to pop-calls.
Our whole being must be in our praying; like John Knox, we must say and
feel, “Give me Scotland, or I die.” Our experience and revelations of
God are born of our costly sacrifice, our costly conflicts, our costly
praying. The wrestling, all night praying, of Jacob made an era never to
be forgotten in Jacob’s life, brought God to the rescue, changed Esau’s
attitude and conduct, changed Jacob’s character, saved and affected his
life and entered into the habits of a nation.
Our seasons of importunate prayer cut themselves, like the print of a
diamond, into our hardest places, and mark with ineffaceable traces our
characters. They are the salient periods of our lives! the memorial
stones which endure and to which we turn.
Importunity, it may be repeated, is a condition of prayer. We are to
press the matter, not with vain repetitions, but with urgent
repetitions. We repeat, not to count the times, but to gain the prayer.
We cannot quit praying because heart and soul are in it. We pray “with
all perseverance.” We hang to our prayers because by them we live. We
press our pleas because we must have them or die. Christ gives us two
most expressive parables to emphasise the necessity of importunity in
praying. Perhaps Abraham lost Sodom by failing to press to the utmost
his privilege of praying. Joash, we know, lost because he stayed his
smiting.
Perseverance counts much with God as well as with man. If Elijah had
ceased at his first petition the heavens would have scarcely yielded
their rain to his feeble praying. If Jacob had quit praying at decent
bedtime he would scarcely have survived the next day’s meeting with
Esau. If the Syrophenician woman had allowed her faith to faint by
silence, humiliation, repulse, or stop mid-way its struggles, her
grief-stricken home would never have been brightened by the healing of
her daughter.
Pray and never faint, is the motto Christ gives us for praying. It is
the test of our faith, and the severer the trial and the longer the
waiting, the more glorious the results.
The benefits and necessity of importunity are taught by Old Testament
saints. Praying men must be strong in hope, and faith, and prayer. They
must know how to wait and to press, to wait on God and be in earnest in
our approaches to Him.
Abraham has left us an example of importunate intercession in his
passionate pleading with God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, and if, as
already indicated, he had not ceased in his asking, perhaps God would
not have ceased in His giving. “Abraham left off asking before God left
off granting.” Moses taught the power of importunity when he interceded
for Israel forty days and forty nights, by fasting and prayer. And he
succeeded in his importunity.
Jesus, in His teaching and example, illustrated and perfected this
principle of Old Testament pleading and waiting. How strange that the
only Son of God, who came on a mission direct from His Father, whose
only heaven on earth, whose only life and law were to do His Father’s
will in that mission—what a mystery that He should be under the law of
prayer, that the blessings which came to Him were impregnated and
purchased by prayer; stranger still that importunity in prayer was the
process by which His wealthiest supplies from God were gained. Had He
not prayed with importunity, no transfiguration would have been in His
history, no mighty works had rendered Divine His career. His all-night
praying was that which filled with compassion and power His all-day
work. The importunate praying of His life crowned His death with its
triumph. He learned the high lesson of submission to God’s will in the
struggles of importunate prayer before He illustrated that submission so
sublimely on the cross.
“Whether we like it or not,” said Mr. Spurgeon, “_asking is the rule of
the kingdom_. ‘Ask, and ye shall receive.’ It is a rule that never will
be altered in anybody’s case. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the elder brother
of the family, but God has not relaxed the rule for Him. Remember this
text: Jehovah says to His own Son, ‘Ask of Me, and I will give Thee the
heathen for Thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for
Thy possession.’ If the Royal and Divine Son of God cannot be exempted
from the rule of asking that He may have, you and I cannot expect the
rule to be relaxed in our favour. Why should it be? What reason can be
pleaded why we should be exempted from prayer? What argument can there
be why we should be deprived of the privilege and delivered from the
necessity of supplication? I can see none: can you? God will bless
Elijah and send rain on Israel, but Elijah must pray for it. If the
chosen nation is to prosper, Samuel must plead for it. If the Jews are
to be delivered, Daniel must intercede. God will bless Paul, and the
nations shall be converted through him, but Paul must pray. Pray he did
without ceasing; his epistles show that he expected nothing except by
asking for it. If you may have everything by asking, and nothing without
asking, I beg you to see how absolutely vital prayer is, and I beseech
you to abound in it.”
There is not the least doubt that much of our praying fails for lack of
persistency. It is without the fire and strength of perseverance.
Persistence is of the essence of true praying. It may not be always
called into exercise, but it must be there as the reserve force. Jesus
taught that perseverance is the essential element of prayer. Men must be
in earnest when they kneel at God’s footstool.
Too often we get faint-hearted and quit praying at the point where we
ought to begin. We let go at the very point where we should hold on
strongest. Our prayers are weak because they are not impassioned by an
unfailing and resistless will.
God loves the importunate pleader, and sends him answers that would
never have been granted but for the persistency that refuses to let go
until the petition craved for is granted.
————————————————————————————————
_I suspect I have been allotting habitually too little time to
religious exercises as private devotion, religious meditation,
Scripture reading, etc. Hence I am lean and cold and hard. God
would perhaps prosper me more in spiritual things if I were to be
more diligent in using the means of grace. I had better allot more
time, say two hours or an hour and a half, to religious exercises
daily, and try whether by so doing I cannot preserve a frame of
spirit more habitually devotional, a more lively sense of unseen
things, a warmer love to God, and a greater degree of hunger and
thirst after righteousness, a heart less prone to be soiled with
worldly cares, designs, passions, and apprehension and a real
undissembled longing for heaven, its pleasures and its purity._
—WILLIAM WILBERFORCE.