You need to persevere in munching your way through that bag of chips. You need to persevere through another episode of that show you love. You need to persevere in taking a nap on a Sunday afternoon.
These instructions sound odd, don’t they? It’s because we reserve the word “perseverance” for difficult tasks—something that doesn’t come easy yet brings great reward.
Why Prayer Is Hard
One of the best ways to introduce people to spiritual practices like prayer, Bible reading, and churchgoing is not by overselling how easy it is to adopt these habits but by reminding people of just how challenging they can be. Spiritual habits are hard. They require effort and discipline.
The New Testament urges us to persevere in prayer because it’s so easy not to pray. When Jesus told us to “pray always and not give up” (Luke 18:1), he implied that giving up would be the easier path. He told the disciples to watch and pray in Gethsemane because he knew how easily they could fail in their attention and fall asleep (22:40, 46).
When Paul echoed these commands—calling us to “be persistent in prayer” (Rom. 12:12) or to “devote” ourselves to prayer, staying “alert” in it “with thanksgiving” (Col. 4:2)—it was because he knew how easy it’d be to slacken the rope, to drift from attentiveness, to diminish our devotion. In the face of struggle, we’re reminded to “pray constantly” (1 Thess. 5:17), to press on in faith, even when the answers seem delayed.
These aren’t the commands of a cheerless moralist instructing us to eat our oatmeal just because it’s good for us. They’re more like the encouragement we get from a coach guiding us through a grueling game or a captain leading the charge when we’re tempted to give up the fight. That’s important: Prayer is part of the battle—an essential aspect of the Christian life, not a prelude to whatever we envision as real ministry. As Vance Pitman puts it, “We don’t pray before we work. Prayer is the work, and then God works.”
When Prayer Feels Pointless
The problem, all too often, is that we don’t see the results of our prayers—not the immediate workings of the Spirit groaning in and through us nor the future outcomes our prayers may be a means of accomplishing. We talk to God and wonder if we’re just talking to the walls, like someone muttering in the cell of an asylum.
Life often provides good reasons to question prayer’s power. N. T. Wright points to the bleakness of R. S. Thomas’s poem “Folk Tale,” which describes prayer as someone standing outside a house, trying to attract attention by flinging gravel at a high window. The whole effort seems pointless, and you’d stop throwing the stones if not for the occasional twitch of a curtain. That’s not what prayer is really like, of course, but it’s an honest portrayal of how it sometimes feels. It reminds me of the searing pain C. S. Lewis described after the death of his wife, Joy:
Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house.
Everyone who perseveres in prayer will at some point feel the palpable presence of God’s absence. The saints of old speak of times when it felt as if God had withdrawn from them, even if later they believed this apparent absence was a divine beckoning—to come closer to the real God, not the illusions we often settle for.
Prayer isn’t meant to be comfortable. As Kyle Strobel often says, in prayer we draw near to the purifying fire of God, and that’s when all our impurities leak out. We’re not doing something wrong when we feel inadequate or when our minds wander in a thousand directions. The priorities and desires of our hearts are being exposed to the refining fire that shapes us.
Why Persevere?
We’re called to persevere in prayer because it’s important to stay awake, to remain attentive, to keep watch over our souls as we yearn for God’s presence in our daily lives.
If we think prayer is easy, like a tasty treat to indulge in before or after a long day, we’ll likely drift from the practice when it doesn’t seem enjoyable. We miss the deeper truth that prayer is more like strapping a sword to our side, readying ourselves for spiritual war. We don’t know what role our prayers play in the ongoing spiritual battle around us, but we believe—even when we can’t see—that prayer changes things, that more is happening in us and around us than we can imagine.
So we persist in knocking. We push through the dullness. We press on through the weariness. We stoke the embers of our often cooling hearts, reengaging our affections for the God who promises to meet us in those quiet moments. As Lewis wrote in his last year of life,
One of the purposes for which God instituted prayer may have been to bear witness that the course of events is not governed like a state but created like a work of art to which every being makes its contribution and (in prayer) a conscious contribution, and in which every being is both an end and a means.
God is painting a masterpiece. Prayer is our contribution as Christians. Prayer is our duty as disciples. Prayer is to be our delight as lovers of God.
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