October 19 Daily Devotional

Always to pray, and not to faint

The importance of [the] element of persistence cannot be exaggerated. You find it not only in biblical teaching, but also in the lives of all the saints.... If we really want to be men of God, if we really want to know Him, and walk with Him, and experience those boundless blessings which He has to offer us, we must persist in asking Him for them day by day. We have to feel this hunger and thirst after righteousness, and then we shall be filled. And that does not mean that we are filled once and for ever. We go on hungering and thirsting. Like the Apostle Paul, leaving the things which are behind, we ‘press toward the mark’. ‘Not as though I had already attained’, says Paul, ‘but I follow after.’ That is it. This persistence, this constant desire, asking, seeking, and knocking. This, we must agree, is the point at which most of us fail.

Let us then hold on to that first principle. Let us examine ourselves in the light of these Scriptures and the pictures given of the Christian man in the New Testament. Let us look at these glorious promises and ask ourselves, ‘Am I experiencing them?’ And if we find we are not, as we must all confess, then we must go back again to this great statement. That is what I mean by the possibilities. While I must begin by asking and seeking, I must go on doing so until I am aware of an advance and a development and a rising to a higher spiritual level. We must keep on at it. It is a ‘fight of faith’; it is ‘he that endureth to the end’ that will be saved in this sense. Persistence, continuance in well-doing, ‘always to pray and not to faint’. Not just pray when we want a great blessing and then stop; always pray. Persistence; that is the first thing. The realization of the need, the realization of the supply, and persistence in seeking after it.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 201–2