Persevering in Prayer with Faith
When God Seems Silent
Luke chapter 18 has already been read to us, but I guess this is probably in a different translation. So let's see what it says to us. And he told them a parable, that is Jesus told them a parable, to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, in a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow. in that city who kept coming to him and saying, give me justice against my adversary. For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice so that she will not beat me down by her continued coming. And the Lord said, hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? This is the word of the Lord. about people being old in church and everyone laughs. If I did that everyone would gasp and all the ladies would slap me up the back of the head. So I don't know what the difference is. Fair enough. All right. So we are finishing now with our final sermon in the series on prayer. And we are now, we kind of already tackled this half part where we were talking about the sovereignty of God in prayer. How do those two things, how can you pray to a sovereign God who knows everything? What's even the point in it? But the reality was one sermon is not going to cover that whole topic. You could spend a whole series just doing that one thing on prayer. But we're specifically looking at what do we do with all these unanswered prayers? Can you put your hand up if you have an unanswered prayer in your life that you've been doing for at least a year? Come on, we've probably all got one, even if we don't go to it all the time. We've all got something we've wanted for a very long time. Good or bad, whatever it is, we desperately want it. And so today... we're going to be looking at that exact thing. How do we get that? So first, let's begin in prayer and then we'll get into the thick of it. Father, give us your truth now. Father, speak to us through your word. Father, grant me a clarity to speak it. And in the power of your spirit, Lord, would you make your word one with us so that we might be changed, transformed, made from one degree of glory to the next, that one day we may be made like you. When you return that final trumpet blows Lord, we long for that day. So Lord, encourage us now as we work towards it and as we look forward to it. In Jesus name we pray, amen. So like I've already said, few experiences in the Christian life are harder than this. I've prayed to a God who's all powerful. He can do anything. And it has been 30 years. three years, three months, however long, and nothing has happened. He seemingly hasn't moved, no action has taken. It is seemingly like it's fallen on deaf ears. And so this silence here, it triggers this conflict within us, this crisis. like, what's God doing? What's He sitting up there? Is He like Baal from when Elijah was on Mount Carmel and he's saying, well, ha ha, is your God out there relieving Himself? Maybe He's in the toilet. You need to knock a bit harder. No. Am I missing something? Am I not praying right? Maybe he has answered, I just didn't see it. Right, you remember that first story that Norm gave us for, right? Where he was going along the highway and the lights came, but the lights were only going 80 kilometres an hour and he didn't want to sit behind that, right? Sorry for you, you just weren't there, but anyway, that's probably not a good point then. But nonetheless. We wrestled with these things. Is this not working? Are you all right now? All good? Cool. All right. You guys can hear me. Yeah, we're good. Laughing. And so obviously, and then particularly our friends come up to us, what am I doing? Am I doing something wrong? We ask all these questions and inevitably we know the most obvious immediate answer. Why have you not received the answer to your prayers? Because it isn't God's will at this moment. But is there more to it than just that? That is true, but this basic answer often doesn't ease the actual tension we feel. It doesn't make it any easier. So is there anything that can actually help us? Now, unfortunately, I don't have the magic formula today that you're going to find to be able to force God's hand. That's not going to change. But what the Bible does offer us is simply more than the answer. It is God's will. Yes, it is God's will that you do not receive the answer to your prayer in this moment, but He hasn't just left you with that. He is a father. He provides things to help you, to support you, to encourage you and comfort you. So what are those things? So four things we'll go through today. One, God ordains the ends and the means. Two, persistence in the promises. Three, God is good all the time. And then number four, count all things as rubbish. So our first point, God ordains the means and the ends. Now, like I said, when we go through these seasons in life, often when we kind of struggle with the Bible a bit, because we know the God of the Bible, but it's not correlating to our circumstances, we just don't see it. Suddenly we have to fall back on faith. One of our favourite things to go to is our thinking, our logic, right? Because this is how I put it together. All-powerful God plus my request equals answered prayer. He's not a guy who's got to sit there and says, well, we've got to figure out the reports first and we've got to go through all the red tape. No, no, no. He's all-powerful God. He doesn't need to listen to anyone. He can do whatever he wants. So therefore, surely shouldn't that mean he has absolute power? My request should be answered. Particularly, said, I'm his child. He wants to listen to me. He says he always hears me. So what's stopping him from acting? But you see here, again, we have fallen prey to our logic, not to the actual truth of the Bible. You see, it's funny. I spoke on this topic at the Christian college on Friday, Wednesday and Friday at their chapel. where we're asking the question, if I really want something, why doesn't God give it to me? And you see, it's funny because when we ask that question, what's the God that we really want? Because we don't want the God of the Bible there. What we actually want is the genie from Aladdin, right? You rub the lamp, he pops out and grants you your wishes. That's what I want because then it happens now, I'm in control and it is how I want it. But you see, that is what this simplistic view of God is, where it sees it as simply He's just a genie who grants me my wishes. Obviously none of us think that, but most of us kinda want that. but we have to encounter who the actual God of the Bible is and how He actually works. Because you have to understand, we see God, He's like, He's got this whole plan, but we seem to think that He's only concerned with the end of the plan, with the end purposes, right? I pray that my whole family be saved. Who doesn't pray that, right? So therefore, why doesn't it just happen? And I would think God wants to save people, so why doesn't He just make it happen? I think that he's only concerned with the end goal and not at all with the fact that there is actually a journey to make. This is what I say, when I say the means, right? You have the ends, the end goal, but there is a means, a way through which something happens. Think of it like this, You're going on holidays. You're going to, I don't know, wherever you guys like to go on holidays. We love cans, all right? I hate most of the places in Queensland, but love cans. Chinchilla, cans. two places in the world, get rid of the rest, I'm fine, right? Okay, maybe Chinchilla's not that great to some people, but anyway, Cairns, right? Give me, right? Everyone loves Cairns. Now, I think most diligent parents, some people inevitably do this, you just punch it in the GPS and whatever route it takes, you're just like, I'll go that way. Trusting from Chinchilla to Cairns, I wouldn't trust that GPS too much, right? I would maybe stick to a more determined route. And maybe particularly if you've never gone up there, you check the distances, you see where the fuel stops are. Maybe if you're staying over somewhere and out, we need a place to stop. So you're doing a bit of research, you're figuring it out, right? Because it's not just about the destination, there's a journey to be made as well. And so we think that God is simply kind of just, He gets the prayer and then He's like, oh, well, let's just plug that into the GPS, figure out how we got there. I'm only concerned with the destination. No, He has plans for the journey as well. He's got all that figured out. better yet, you might stop at a nice camping spot on the way and actually enjoy that more than you do cans. Who knows? Because he has things along the journey that actually have a purpose as well. And this is what we see when we actually read the Bible. Human logic says, right, God wants to save people. And how does he do it? He sends his spirit, right? That is how conversion happens. We are born again through the Holy Spirit. So why doesn't he just send it immediately? All done and dusted. I pray and... goodness, okay, there's something going on with this mic, but anyway. But you see, this shortcut completely ignores what God has actually said about how it works. Consider this, Romans 10, 13 to 15. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then will they call on Him who they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him who they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? How are they to preach unless they are sent? as it is written, beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news. God has appointed the end. We've talked about this beforehand. We can come before God because we are His children chosen before the foundation of the world. But also, how do we come to faith? Through the preaching of the gospel and it will not happen otherwise. You see, God has made it that all those who will come to faith, all those who experience the magical miracle that is conversion, that is salvation, it will always coincide with the preaching and the sharing of the message of the gospel. It won't happen any other way. You see, God doesn't just act there as God, like, I'm God, I don't need humans. He says, I am God and I want to use humans. I will work through them. And yet somehow, I don't understand how it works, but He works through us. Isn't that such a more majestic and powerful God that instead of saying, I'm more powerful and I don't need you guys, He said, I'm more powerful and I can actually work through you guys. That's more impressive, right? because He truly is a powerful God. So you see, His plans work through us, not without us. And we have to wrestle with this every day. God is sovereign and yet we remain responsible. Think about the apostle Paul, right? He knew that God was sovereign over all that He did. We get most of our doctrine of God's sovereignty from His letters, right? That He is sovereign over everything and especially salvation. He had this, but yet didn't make him passive? Was he the kind of guy that sat on the couch and didn't do much? That dude walked most of the world, right? He literally went from Israel to Spain. That's at least a couple thousand Ks, right? And he walked it, hopped on boats, did all kinds of things. You see, he was driven to preach the gospel, and yet this is recorded as he is preaching from Luke when he wrote Acts. And when the Gentiles heard this, preaching, they began to rejoice and glorify the word of the Lord. then as many as were appointed to eternal life believed and the word of the Lord spread throughout the whole region. Paul wasn't sitting there saying, it's all on me, if I don't do this no one's going to come to faith. He knew God was sovereign but at the same time he knew that no one would come to faith if the gospel wasn't preached and so he went about it with urgency. And so you see, an actual biblical endpoint of believing that a God is sovereign and yet believing that we must pray to Him is not saying, well, I don't have to worry about anything now. And it's not saying I have to do it all myself. The endpoint is realizing He is sovereign, so I can trust Him, but also He has called me to pray. So I will do that with urgency. We'll get around to how this deals with unanswered prayers in a bit. But you can even see this intersection of divine planning with human action in Jesus' own life. 2, 23. This Jesus was delivered up to the cross according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. And you crucified him and killed him by the hands of lawless men. God works his perfect plan even through the hands of lawless immoral sinners. Again, how he does this is a mystery. I don't know. But... Scripture directly points us. We can see it in all of history. I've seen it in my own life. God works through sinners. God has worked through me. The Old Testament, the New Testament are filled with stories of how He has always done that. So when answers are delayed, you see, this is the problem, is that we focus exclusively on the endpoint. I haven't got there. What's the point in the journey? There is no point. No, there always is. Jesus spent 33 years on earth before he got to the cross, which is the point of why came. Why? Wait, because there was a reason to the journey, not just the destination. And so we must be careful. not to misinterpret delay and silence as though God is refusing to work. God is doing something. If we just received the answer to all our prayers, we wouldn't need faith. We must trust that He is working and that He will answer in His right time and in His right way. So it's the first thing, understanding the journey matters just as much as the destination. And now the second one, persistence in the promises. So we see that God wants us to understand that there is a journey in all of this. But now we turn to our parable. Now, of course, you guys can obviously understand we're pulling different things from different passages. So we're not doing a full exposition of the woman, the parable of the persistent widow, but we will explore it in this passage here. See, God uses our constant seeking Him to transform things inside us that we can't always see. We've learnt assurance of God's sovereignty doesn't cancel out what we have to do, right? He actually works in all the things we do. there's a very important thing for us to learn now in this parable. Now, important thing about parables, Just because something's in them doesn't necessarily mean that it's... you have to... how do I phrase this? Not everything correlates to God, right? So, we have the unrighteous judge. That doesn't mean God isn't righteous, all right? What it is talking is taking the argument from lesser to greater. It's saying, if an unrighteous judge even listens to a nagging widow, what do you think the father with his own children does. Our Father in heaven, surely he listens. And so it is talking about here that surely if He will, if this unrighteous judge will respond, our God will too. But then it's particularly pointing us to the fact, see how the widow, she keeps going, she's persistent, she keeps at it, right? Even marnie up the front this morning, she's obviously been listening to me as we've been talking about this parable during the week, because Colleen's keys there on that chair right there. She has wanted to get after them every single time. She will not refuse. She refuses to give up until she has those keys. Right? Persistence is part of what He's trying to teach us. Because you see, prayer is not a machine. God is not a machine where we simply put in our request once and then we know, oh well, He's heard it so it's just gonna simply spit out. Even though He hears us immediately, which He always does, He requires us to persist. Because I'll ask you this, think about it. Do you guys, have you ever, particularly when you had young kids, did you ever ask them a question you knew the answer to? Yes, of course you did, right? You're asking someone, what do you think one plus one equals? You know, I know what it equals, I'm an adult. It's probably bad if an adult doesn't know what one plus one equals, sorry if you don't. um But the reality is, right, why are you doing that? So that they struggle, so that they use their own brains to develop and to grow because they need to learn to walk on their own two feet. And so you see, that parent is actually making them, they know the answer, they're not doing it so they can receive the answer. God isn't asking us to persist so that He finally hears. But He's asking it so that we might grow, that we might struggle because again, He has a purpose in the journey, in the struggle. So He asked us to persist, to keep going. Because we are being formed by our wrestling with Him. Just think about this. One person we've already talked about, Jacob. When he wrestled, with God on the bank of the river. God had already promised to bless him beforehand, several years before this event happened. Even better yet, he had given it to Jacob, sorry Jacob, to Isaac, his father, saying, one of your sons will be the one to inherit the promises. So they already had the promise. yet to gain that deeper assurance, he had to wrestle with God. And at the very end, he is left struggling, he is left with a limp, but yet he walks towards Esau, ready to face him, ready with confidence that God is with him. He is assured because he has found and submitted to the promise. Another example, Moses. Moses began his life as a frightened man, right? He had run off for 40 years, spent it in the wilderness as a shepherd after being Prince of Egypt. And then God appears to him in the bush. And then says, I want you to go and I want you to lead the people out. And then he says, but what if they don't listen to me? What if they don't like me, basically? He is scared of a few Hebrews, right? But yet he doesn't stay that way. You see, eventually he does go. He's so scared of talking, his brother Aaron comes alongside and speaks on his behalf. But he is a man of God. But yet then he does lead them out. They come to Mount Sinai where they receive the Ten Commandments and then we know what inevitably happens there, the golden calf, right? And then God says to them, he says to Moses on top of the mountain, I can't go with you. I cannot go with you into the promised land because if I go with you, these people will anger me so much, I will consume them. But he says, will send an angel instead. He will go with you. He will lead you. You will inherit the land. I just won't be there. Moses refuses to take that as an answer. He says in Exodus 33, 15 to 17, and he said to him, If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. How shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I in your people? Is it not in your going with us that we are distinct, I in your people from every other people on the face of the earth? And the Lord said to Moses, this very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight and I know you by name. God had promised to Abraham that he would dwell in the land with the people. God always was going to do that. But yet you see, he had to respond to the wickedness of the people. And but yet in this, he tests the man that was their leader. He tests Moses. Will you be content having the land without the one that it was made for? Are you content to have me, sorry, to have the land and yet not have me? And he says, no. He was scared of a few Hebrews beforehand, but yet now just not even really a year later, he is boldly proclaiming before God what he wants. He is not even scared of God because he knows the promise of God. You promised to our father Abraham, you would come with us and so you must stay true to that promise. God is not capitulating here. Yes, it seems like he is, but he was always going to come. This is part of our relationship with God. Just as you guys have those unanswered prayers. Has he not said that he desires that all should come to repentance? Yes, but yet seemingly he hasn't answered my prayer. But that is because he's calling you to persist, to keep after him, say, you made this promise, you stay true to it. so that is what we must do. We must be like the nagging widow. Don't view his silences in activity. God is working as we endure in this wilderness. We haven't yet made it to the promised land of the answer. But like Jacob and Moses, we hold on to his promises and we bring them back to him. We say, you promise this, so you do it. This actually models what our prayer should look like. We should bring God's promises to him, not just say, well, he already knows them, so don't need to worry about that. Come to him and said, you desire that none should perish, but all should reach repentance. So do it for those I love. Do it for those I don't even love, those I don't know. Just you made this promise, so you stay true to it, bring them to repentance. In trials, remind him, you said, you will never leave me, you're never gonna forsake me. And you promise you'll work all things to my good. You're not reminding him. But in that, in that persistence, you are actually making those promises a part of who you are. and God is doing. That is how He has shown us the model that we are to do it. That we are transformed by His truth by becoming a bunch of nagging widows. So, you guys probably shouldn't nag people in general, but if you're allowed to one nag person, God, do it a lot and always. So, this brings us to our third point. We persist, we keep asking, we don't lose heart, we keep at His door, we keep knocking. But you will need something, because we may be knocking for 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, hopefully not that long, years, right? Jacob wrestled mightily, right? But there was also another man who wrestled with God, Job. He had to struggle much with the suffering that he was going through, as well as the accusation of his closest friends, who basically said, it's all your fault this is happening. Yet he held on to one definitive line through all that he was going through, recorded in Job 2.10. You see, he sat there and said, as his wife just said, curse God and die. Just be done with it. Look at God has left you behind. He said, no, no, no. I have received good from God, but shall I not also receive evil from him? What was Job falling back on there? He was not saying God's evil. What he was saying is that if this is happening to me, it still comes from God and therefore it must be good. The whole book of Job is him wrestling with who God is and how this can happen to him. 40 chapters. And see, we must have this same foundation, this same backstop as well. That as we deal with these unanswered prayers in our lives, we need something under us. Something... Because if we just keep going, if I just keep assisting, we have nothing to fall back on. Eventually the devil will have his way with us because one of the devil's favorite lies is to pervert our view of who God really is. you know, eventually you've been going for a while, you've been praying for 20 years and you're just like, maybe God really is vindictive, maybe He is just angry with me. Maybe because of that one time that I did that one thing, He's not going to answer my prayer, because of what my grandfather did 20 years ago. Maybe God just doesn't care about me. albeit yet sometimes we can even sit there and say, well, God doesn't care. Even talk to me, maybe He doesn't care about my sin either. And we become vulnerable to these lies when we persist for so long. God tests us when we are weak to see if we're actually going to lean on Him or not. And so the critical question is, are we going to trust on who He has revealed Himself to be? Or are we going to buy into the lies of the devil that are being sowed through the waiting? Right? As we wait, we become weaker and we struggle. Will we keep trusting him? Sorry, lost my spot there. Now, the reality is we must accept sometimes. God is a good Father. And so, God's goodness means that He loves us so much that sometimes He will not grant us our every request. You see, the reality is sometimes we have to persist and we actually learn in our persisting that was never a good request at all. And you see, we can actually deal with that, we can persist with that because we understand, I have a good Father and He's not going to give me something that I don't need. Sorry, not gonna give me something, yeah. That's bad for me. In His mercy, He denies requests that stem from blind and sinful desires. This is something we have to wrestle with. Just because you pray for something for 15 years doesn't necessarily make that thing good, right? I'm not saying it isn't, but just because we want it doesn't make it a good thing. An unanswered prayer is sometimes an answer. And every prayer at every time, every answer from God, if you have not received it is what? What is the answer? It is simply not what you need at this time. We have to walk through this every day, that every time we pray for our kids, for our grandkids, for anyone, for our family, for our friends, when God does not answer that, when God does not deliver us from suffering, from struggles, if He doesn't answer it, it's because we do not need to be freed from it. We do not need that thing in this very moment. Incredibly hard thing to deal with. because the things that we're praying for are good. But you see, we have to let Scripture be our guide, not the things that we can see around us. So we build this grounding by knowing God's Word and bringing His truths back to him. Like I said, the promises. So one note before we go on to our last point. I want to say something about we have particular requests which obviously are according to God's will. God desires that many should come to repentance, so we pray for people to be saved. God desires we should be freed from our sins, so we pray for freedom from our sin. But there are certain things, know, career moves, who should I marry, should we move to this place, all those kinds of things that aren't explicitly laid out for us in the Bible and probably never will be. And we can pray for those things, we should. But when waiting is in suspension, right, waiting for the answer to those things, I want you to add a little request to that. Because many times we can be praying over and over for these things. And we pray for so long that we've built this vision of what the end goal will be. All of us are prone to tunnel vision when it comes to the answer to our prayers, that we think it has to come a specific way. But I ask you pray this, God, if you haven't answered this request yet, please give me eyes to see what it is you do want us to do. Because you see, the reality is, if God has an answer to prayer, well, you've still got all this free time. You've still got things you can be doing. So God, what do want me to do? God, open my eyes to see things I might be blind to, because we can become very rigid in thinking God will only answer one way, and we are all prone to this. So now, that was just a quick point. Now, onto our fourth and final point. Count all things as rubbish. So, if you've been sleeping the whole time, first point, God is working in the journey and the destination. That is why sometimes we must wait, because he's doing a work we just can't see. And what do we do during the journey? Keep asking. Don't lose heart. Keep assisting. Keep going. Don't take no for an answer. And then the third point, as we battle through those times, don't fall back on what you can see, fall back on who God is. And now this is a particularly important part of the reason why we must. We must intentionally force our eyes onto that thing which matters most of all. Notice what Paul treasured above everything else. If you guys, if that, the name of this point rings any bells, you'll probably know where I'm going to. Philippians 3, 8. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. He says another place, I count it all rubbish. It is nothing to me. You see, what is he saying? What is his greatest treasure? What does he want above everything else? To know Jesus. He says, as long as I know Him, everything else is rubbish in comparison to that. It's not to say the other things aren't important. They might be very precious. but a comparison to knowing Jesus, being in relationship with him, it is all rubbish. And so you see, this is the hard thing. Often, how many of our unanswered prayers are typically about our circumstances? Particularly about the circumstances of others, they may be very good prayers. How often are our unanswered prayers about God revealing Himself to us? Who of you has sat there for six months and said, I've been praying for God to reveal Himself to me, He just hasn't done it? I haven't done that. Goodness, I wish I did. But you see, often the most painful prayers that we have are focused on changing the external circumstances around us rather than knowing God. These external requests are good. I'm not saying they are bad, but we must understand they always occupy a subservient, secondary place. because you often see that one of the most important things he's teaching us in the silence is that the thing we always needed and the only thing we actually need is him. And you see, this is gonna be the hard thing, because if Jesus is not the supreme treasure of our lives... we will often hold bitter grudges towards God in prayer. It is so right for us to desire the salvation of loved ones. It is so right for you guys to want to be freed from the sin that is in your lives. Of course. But ultimately, we must rest in God's perfect plan, His sovereign plan. Particularly, this is hard. Thinking about the salvation of our loved ones, we must wrestle with the fact that even if God passes over those who are closest to us, we must trust in His justice and His grace. We must trust in His plan and not our own. I actually have to believe that there's a reality where I can be in heaven, where those I love can be in hell, and I will actually be happy. I can't imagine myself as that yet. I don't understand how that works, but I have to believe that because it may very well happen. Otherwise, I'm going to spend all my eternity in heaven and be utterly depressed. You see, we can have incredibly holy desires for salvation, for freedom from our sin. But if our final joy is not in having God for all eternity, those holy desires can actually become idolatry. If our delay actually begins to lead us to rebel and to question the character of who God is, that is sinful. God hasn't permitted us to condition our joy and our obedience on Him, on Him answering our prayers. even those that are most precious to us. Paul is saying here, if I lost everything, even if those that were closest to me, not a single one, were in heaven, God, you would still be enough for me. We don't have to understand it. We just have to believe it's true, that God is enough for us. We don't need to be freed from a life of suffering. We don't need to have everyone saved as much as we want it. We just need to know that we are with God, He loves us and He will never let us go. This isn't some kind of saying that, you know, we shouldn't be praying for these things. Pray urgently for everything. But you are always to fall back on the fact that all we need is God. We are not to elevate any outcome to the same level as God by making our happiness dependent on it. So be persistent, be expecting that God will answer, but finally and ultimately find your contentment in God alone. So again, I do apologize. In this message, there was no formula to answer every unanswered prayer. You may still be waiting another 30 years. I just heard this morning of someone who got engaged for the first time at 82 years of age. If that ain't waiting, I don't know what is, right? Sometimes we must continue to wait. But I hope in some of these things you understand, ultimately at the end of the day, I'm saying keep going and trust that God's sovereign. I'm sorry I didn't have a more, yeah, amazing message for you. The reality was I've simply given you things to help you grapple with the waiting. The reasons behind why He does not answer us, they remain hidden. We don't know them all. I just know that the reasons are good. because I know who he is. So we just learn to keep going, to not lose hope. The core end of the day is that your faith endures. That is what you need at the end of the day. You need to keep believing, to not be snuffed out, and that is the one thing I hope remains. So let us wrap up in prayer and then we'll move into a time of communion. Father. I know, we know, in this very moment as we're praying to you, you hear us. Father, because of what your Son did on the cross by dying in our place, by taking the punishment, we are at peace with you. There's nothing between you and us anymore. We are your habitation. You dwell within us. So of course you hear our every thought, our every prayer. Father, we don't need to doubt that. But what we doubt is what you were doing. Why don't you answer us? Why do you seem to delay? We know your plan is good. Help us to rest in it. But most of all, Father, would you hear our cries? Would you hear our pleas? And Father, as you've called us to be persistent, would you help us to be persistent and not to lose heart? Would you help us to hold us, would you help us to hold you to your promises? Father, you have made these promises so that we might hold you to them. So Father, would you save our families? Father, would you deliver us from our sins? Father, would you bless us in every way, but most of all, would you bless us with yourself? Because we know that above all things, that is all we need and we will rest content in that. Would you help us to rest content in that, happy and satisfied with you and you alone? We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.