Long Obedience
GEORGE MUELLER, the great Victorian Christian and social reformer, tells a story of persistent prayer in his diary:
In November 1844, I began to pray for the conversion of five individuals. I prayed every day without a single intermission, whether sick or in health, on the land, on the sea, and whatever the pressure of my engagements might be. Eighteen months elapsed before the first of the five was converted. I thanked God and prayed on for the others. Five years elapsed, and then the second was converted. I thanked God for the second, and prayed on for the other three. Day by day, I continued to pray for them, and six years passed before the third was converted. I thanked God for the three, and went on praying for the other two. These two remained unconverted.
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Thirty-six years later he wrote that the other two, sons of one of Mueller's friends, were still not converted. He wrote, "But I hope in God, I pray on, and look for the answer. They are not converted yet, but they will be." 2 In 1897, fifty-two years after he began to pray daily, without interruption, for these two men, they were finally converted—but after he died! Mueller understood what Luke meant when he introduced a parable Jesus told about prayer, saying, "Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up" (Luke 18:1).
It's surprising to discover, given the importance Jesus attached to prayer, how little he actually said about how to pray. He gives no techniques, no methods to prayer, only a brief summary of what to pray about, the Lord's Prayer, and an urging for us to doggedly keep at it, to hang in with it, to persist and insist in prayer. In Luke 18, he encourages us to copy a widow who badgers a corrupt judge ...
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