Praying Unceasingly

Pray without ceasing.

Pray at all times. Unceasing, prevailing, persistent prayer is so essential. Prayer is an essential part of Christian living, and it flows out of dependence on God. It's said that nothing is discussed more and practiced less than prayer. Of course, that's not to say Christians aren't committed to prayer. But we would all have to admit failures in meeting the biblical standard for prayer. And what is that standard? Well, as the apostle Paul put it, you are to pray without ceasing.

How is that possible? And how do your prayer habits fit into the health of your church? Find out today here on Grace to You as John MacArthur continues his practical study from 1 Thessalonians 5 titled, The Bible-Driven Church. Let John help you understand this issue of praying without ceasing like you never have.

Here's the lesson. First Thessalonians 5 17 says pray without ceasing. The apostle Paul in this simple and specific command calls on Christians to pray basically as a way of life. I used to say, praying is like breathing.

It's just normal, it's just natural, it's just living for us. We inhale, we exhale the atmosphere of the presence and the power of God. And while that is true, it is also true that we who are dependent on God and who if genuinely Christians do commune with God, do not pray as unceasingly as we ought to pray. We are guilty, I think, of spiritually holding our breath. While we would assume that the pressure of the very environment of God's presence would force us to pray, even as air pressure forces us to breathe, that's not necessarily the case. And we as Christians restrict our intake of the very presence of God due to our own sinfulness. And so comes the injunction of the apostle Paul to pray without ceasing. Pray at all times, continual, persistent, incessant prayer is an essential part of Christian living and it flows out of dependence on God.

I want us to understand this principle of praying without ceasing and while just reading it gives you a certain clear understanding, there is much more to enhance the significance of that statement found in Scripture and I want to see if I can't give you some of the riches of what the Word has to say. A good starting point is to look at two parables that our Lord gave. In fact, among the many parables of our Lord, these two stand out as unique.

They are unique for a very simple and interesting reason. All other parables relate to God by comparison. All other parables relate to God by comparison. In some way they are like God, they are like God's kingdom, they are like the way God operates. These two parables relate to God by contrast.

They are not like God. They're the only two parables Jesus ever gave that relate to God in a contrasting way. These two parables show us illustrations of someone who is utterly unlike God and in so doing make a very, very strong point about this matter of persistent praying without ceasing. Let's turn to these two parables. The first one we find is in Luke chapter 11.

It is called the parable of the reluctant friend. Luke chapter 11. Our Lord gave it in a context of prayer. In fact, the disciples had come to Him and they said, Luke 11, 1, Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples. And Jesus responded to them with the very familiar words, when you pray, say, Father hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us and lead us not into temptation. The familiar Lord's Prayer, or disciples' prayer. So in verses 2 to 4, Jesus taught them what to say.

He taught them basically the content of prayer. When you pray, you are to honor God and hallow His name. You are to pray for those things that relate to His kingdom. You are to seek the daily provision that He alone gives. You are to confess your sins and seek His forgiveness, and you are to ask for His wisdom so as not to be led into temptation.

Those are the component parts of prayer. That's how to pray, what to say when you pray. But beyond that, He said to them, suppose one of you shall have a friend and shall go to him at midnight and say to him, friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has come to me from a journey and I have nothing to set before him. And from inside, he shall answer and say, do not bother me. The door has already been shut and my children and I are in bed.

I cannot get up and give you anything. You have to remember that in those days when it was cold, the whole family got in the same bed for the sake of warmth and they were all tucked in and warm and it was midnight and this was not a time to get out of bed and get some bread for your friend. For, say, I tell you, Jesus said, even though he will not get up and give his friend anything because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence, he will get up and give him as much as he needs. In other words, what he wouldn't do for friendship, he'll do for sleep because the guy won't go away until he gets his bread. So Jesus is saying, here is a man whose friendship will not allow him to make this gesture of sacrifice so the man just keeps irritating him until he finally has no choice. This our Lord is saying should instruct us about the benefits of persistence. But the point he is really making here is that when you consider how unlike the reluctant friend God is, the parable becomes all the more striking. If a reluctant friend will do something for you because you're persistent, imagine what a God who is not reluctant will do if you're persistent.

That's the contrast. God is so different, but God responds to persistence. If an unfaithful friend, a reluctant friend, an unsympathetic friend, a friend who lacks compassion, a friend who has no mercy and feels no grace will because of your persistent asking, respond, what do you think a God who is loving, gracious, merciful, compassionate and tenderhearted will do if you're persistent? Praying without ceasing moves the hand of God. In Luke 18, there is another parable that follows the same contrastive style. In verse 1 of Luke 18, Jesus again has been teaching about prayer and He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not lose heart. If you don't get an immediate answer, if things aren't exactly the way you want them to be, if things don't turn around as quickly as you might have planned, don't lose heart. You need to continue to pray.

You need to pray at all times incessantly, continually, without ceasing. And then to illustrate this, He says there was in a certain city a judge who didn't fear God and didn't respect man. Now you'll have to figure out for yourself how he got to be a judge, but he did. And there was a widow in that city, at least in this story, and she kept coming to him, this judge repeatedly saying, give me legal protection from my opponents...opponent. And for a while, verse 4 says, he was unwilling. But afterward he said to himself, even though I do not fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow bothers me, I will give her legal protection lest by continually coming she wear me out. This woman is a pain. What I will not do for love of God and what I will not do for love of humanity, I will do for peace of mind, he's saying.

I can't take this constant badgering. And then verse 6, and the Lord said, hear what the unrighteous judge said, now shall not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night? And will He delay long over them? I tell you, He will bring about justice for them speedily. You see, God is different than an unjust judge. God is different than a reluctant friend. But if a reluctant friend and an unjust judge will do what is asked because of the continual pleading, then certainly a compassionate, loving, gracious, kind, tender-hearted God will do more.

That's His point. So Jesus is saying, in effect, pray, pray like this, pray persistently, pray consistently, pray at all times, don't give up, don't lose heart, keep knocking, keep asking, keep seeking, and good, compassionate, faithful, loving, gracious, merciful Jehovah, your God will hear and answer. Now some have imagined that such parables are contradictory to other things that Jesus taught. For example, back in Matthew chapter 6, He said something and may on the surface appear contradictory and needs to be understood. In Matthew 6 verse 7, Jesus said, and when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the heathen do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words, therefore do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. You say now, isn't this contradictory? Isn't He saying don't be repetitious in your praying? No. He is saying don't be meaninglessly repetitious.

That's the key word. What do you mean, meaningless repetition? Well the kind of prayers that the pagans pray. They suppose they will be heard for their many words. In other words, it isn't that the deity cares about their heart, it isn't that the God understands the compassion, the passion, the pain, the longing, the desire of the heart. It is that there is some formula, some religious ritual, some ceremony, some mantra, some chant , some something or other, some sequence of beads, some repetitious formula that's going to somehow make that God do something that He otherwise wouldn't do. Jesus was simply saying to them, don't pray in that way. He's not forbidding meaningful repetition. He is not forbidding the pleading of the heart. What He is forbidding is empty ritual, heartless babble that flows only from the mouth and assumes that God will be responding because of the words rather than the heart. So when Paul says pray without ceasing, he's not in disagreement with Jesus. He is simply supporting the principle taught in Luke 11 and Luke 18 that prayer is to be incessant. We are not heard simply for our many words, but we are heard for the cry of our heart. The man who came to his friend's house and needed bread did not pray a formula ritual prayer. He pleaded for something he needed.

The widow who came to the judge did not offer to the judge some mantra or some chant or some recitation of ritual prayer. The woman gave the cry of her heart for protection from one who had the power to do that. And such heart-crying repetitious prayer is that which moves the heart of a compassionate loving God. In fact, we can even start to understand praying without ceasing by looking at the life of our Lord Himself since He did that. He was obviously in constant communion with the Father. We see Him in Scripture rising up early to pray.

We see Him spending all night in prayer. It must have been an unending and non-stop communion between Himself and the Father. Hebrews tells us that He offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears.

That is a fascinating insight. There was an intensity in the prayers of Jesus that is utterly unique, that is utterly amazing. When He prayed on a number of occasions, there was a great agonizing. And we can assume that even though the Scripture does not chronicle for us all the details of all of His praying, that it had much of the same kind of intensity as those prayers that we do see and have revealed to us in the text. When the Bible tells us that He went into the Mount of Olives and prayed all night, there was no doubt an intensity in that kind of praying that we know very little about if anything. The one great classic illustration we have of the intensity of His praying comes in the garden prior to His death where we see Him praying there in sweat and in agony of blood. He is kneeling down and praying, Luke writes in chapter 22 saying, Father, if Thou be willing remove this cup from me, nevertheless not my will but Thine be done. And Luke writes, and being in an agony, He prayed more earnestly and His sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground. There is an agonizing, intense kind of experience here that causes the Lord Jesus Christ to sweat and then to begin to bleed in that very environment of prayer.

That strikes me. It also strikes me that in Matthew chapter 26 verses 38 to 46, it tells us that Jesus repeated the process of His pleading in the garden for three consecutive times. This was a prolonged prayer experience. In fact, we know well that it was prolonged so long that the disciples fell asleep on several occasions. And so in this prolonged agony of prayer, we get an insight into the life of our Lord Jesus Christ which is quite unique.

Let me tell you what I mean by that. The Lord Jesus Christ wrought many mighty works when He was on earth. And none of them is there any apparent expenditure of energy. Though the Scripture says virtue went out of Him, there is nothing that He does in all of the holy Scriptures in terms of the record of the New Testament which would indicate that there was any agonizing in the process of performing that miracle. Whether it would be giving sight to the blind or hearing to the deaf or speech to the dumb or giving health to the sick body or giving walking capability to a lame person or whether it was raising someone from the dead or whether it was feeding 5,000 men plus women plus children 20,000 people by the seaside or whether it was calming a storm or whether it was walking on water, it didn't matter what it was, there is no record that there was any apparent expenditure of energy, any toil, any sweat, any drops of blood in some kind of agonizing to make that thing happen. There seemed to have been no weariness involved, no toil involved, no strain involved, no travail involved until it came to prayer. And when He prayed, there was an agony.

There was a wrenching of His heart, His very being that showed up in His physical body. He prayed in an agony unto blood, a level of intensity that certainly speaks of the persistence that Jesus indicated in Luke 11 and 18 and what Paul had in mind when he said, pray without ceasing. The early church was marked by this kind of continual, passionate, unceasing prayer from the very start, even before the Day of Pentecost in Acts 1.14. All the believers were one, it says, one mind and continually devoting themselves to prayer. Incessant prayer, constant prayer, persistent prayer marked the early church. When the apostles were structuring the church so that all the ministry could be accomplished, they themselves said, we can't do all of these routine things but we will devote ourselves to prayer.

We will devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word. In Acts chapter 12 again, we see the early church, Peter was kept in prison but prayer for him was being made fervently by the church of God. Fervent prayer, incessant prayer, persistent prayer marked the early church. When you come into the epistles, whether you're reading Romans, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, whether you're reading 1 Thessalonians, you hear Paul exhorting believers to prayer. In fact, perhaps as significantly as any of those epistles is Ephesians in marking out the importance of prayer. He says in Ephesians 6 18, with all prayer and petition, pray at all times. It's the same idea, pray at all times.

In the very epistle we're currently studying, 1 Thessalonians 3 verse 10, he gives his own example. We, night and day, keep praying most earnestly. Just a way of life, incessant, unending, ceaseless prayer.

Colossians, I love the testimony of Epaphras, a bond slave of Jesus Christ, always laboring earnestly for you in his prayers. A man of prayer. And in chapter 4 verse 2 of Colossians, he says, devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving, unceasing, prevailing, persistent, insistent, incessant prayer is so essential. Maybe Coleridge was right when he said, prayer is the highest energy of which the human heart is capable and the Christian's greatest achievement on earth. But I fear that if we conceive of prayer as some high energy, noble, glorious achievement, we'll isolate it to a few grand moments in life. It is that, but it is also an incessant kind of communion that should make up the very fabric of our everyday existence.

It does involve intensity. That is the essence of prayer. God is found, you remember, by those who seek Him with all their heart. Wrestling in prayer prevails with God. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much, said James. So while there are those great noble moments of energized, energetic, agonizing prayer, prayer also for us is a very, very evident daily way of life.

Sometimes it just gets more intense than others. Pray without ceasing then is the mandate of God to us. The word pray here is just the general word, prasukimai, the most common New Testament word for pray. It could be praise, it could be thanks, it could be confession, it could be petition, it could be intercession, it could be submission. It's just pray in general. Without ceasing is a word that basically means recurring. It doesn't mean non-stop talking. It means recurring prayer. As I said, just a way of life. We're to be continually in prayer, continually in an attitude of prayer.

You're probably like I am. I rarely ever fall asleep at night other than in the middle of a prayer. I rarely ever wake up in the morning other than praying.

It's so much the fabric of my life to be in an open state of communion with God, sometimes more intense than others but always conscious of His presence that I find myself going to sleep in the middle of my prayers and waking back up in the middle of them again. Scripture gives example of people who pray in the morning, people who pray at noon, people who pray at night, people who pray seven times a day, people who pray at midnight, people who pray all night, people who pray before dawn, people who pray for days, people who pray for weeks, some who prayed long, some prayed short, some prayed kneeling, some prayed standing. Some prayed lying on a bed. Some prayed lying face down on the ground. Some prayed hands up. Some prayed hands down. Some prayed hands out, some prayed face down, some prayed face up, et cetera, et cetera. Every way, everywhere, prayer.

Pray unceasingly. Now if you look at our text again, you see this is kind of a companion to verse 16. Verse 16 says, rejoice always, verse 17 says, pray always.

Really they're partners in spiritual life and they have a beautiful balance. The believer all through his Christian life feels his insufficiency. So he lives in total dependence on God. As long as you feel your insufficiency and you feel your dependence, you're going to pray without ceasing. At the same time, while feeling insufficient and dependent, you also know that you are the beneficiary of stupendous blessing from God. So on the one hand you are praying in dependency, on the other hand you are rejoicing in the reception of the multifold blessing of God. So we rejoice always because God is pouring out blessing in answer to our unceasing prayer. If I as a Christian live in a perpetual state of personal insufficiency, a perpetual state of recognizing my dependency on God, if I live continually thankful for everything He does for me, continually repentant over my sin, continually expressing my love for others, that's going to flow in unspoken prayer to God and it's also going to cause God to open the sluice gates of blessing which will result in my joyful response. And so we are not just to rejoice always, but we are to take the path to that rejoicing which is the path of unceasing prayer which results in blessing which results in joy. If we are to be a healthy church, we must be praying unceasingly. We must be tapping the divine resource.

We must be knocking on the door seeking the loaves of bread. We must be bowing the knee at the foot of divine justice, pleading for our case to be resolved with equity and justice. We must be going before God on behalf of ourselves and others, praying without ceasing. For therein do we release the greatness of the power and blessing of God. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur.

Thanks for being with us. Today John showed you how to pray without ceasing for your spiritual health and for the health of your church. The Bible-Driven Church, that's the title of John's current study.

Along with teaching on this radio station, John also serves as chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. Now John, you've said that prayer is like breathing and it should be the most natural thing for believers, and yet there are lots of Christians who, while they feel motivated to pray, and they want to spend time with the Lord, they're not sure how to get started. Any practical suggestions? Yeah, I guess the most practical suggestion is start and learn to pray without ceasing. Just like an open channel, it's like you never hang up the line. It's just open all the time, and you're in constant communication with the Lord. But maybe to help you a little bit along that line, I want to mention a couple of books that can really get you going in the right direction. The first one is called Alone with God, Rediscovering the Power and Passion of Prayer, Alone with God. It guides you toward praying more biblically and effectively by looking to the one who taught us how to pray, Jesus Christ. It takes a phrase-by-phrase look at the familiar disciples' prayer, sometimes called the Lord's Prayer. It's the model of all praying, and to understand that is to have a framework for prayers that really will honor God. Prayer takes work.

It's a solitary battle that is won or lost from one moment to the next, but it's a battle well worth fighting. By the way, Alone with God has a built-in study guide to help you apply what you're learning, 220 pages. It's a full book. A second book, one of my favorites, At the Throne of Grace. It is a collection of 50 of the prayers that I've prayed before my congregation over the years.

A book my family prevailed on me to put together. No scripts to follow, but think of the prayers in this book as a kind of model for your own prayers. Hardcover book, 250 pages, At the Throne of Grace, available from Grace to you. So you can get Alone with God and follow the teacher Jesus and how he wanted us to pray, and you can get a copy of At the Throne of Grace, some model prayers in which we put what Jesus taught us to practice. Both are affordably priced and available at Grace to you. Yes, and both of these resources can help you have a more vibrant prayer life and experience deeper fellowship with the Lord. To pick up Alone with God or At the Throne of Grace, contact us today. You can place your order online at gty.org, or by phone, dial toll-free 855-GRACE. Again, Alone with God is designed to help you build the spiritual discipline of prayer, and the book At the Throne of Grace is a collection of prayers that John has prayed during worship services at Grace Community Church, and it can help you shape your thoughts when you talk to God.

Shipping is free on both books, so to order Alone with God and At the Throne of Grace, go to gty.org or call us at 800-55-GRACE. And if you'd like to review John's current study, titled The Bible-Driven Church, you can download all eight of these messages at gty.org. Our website has all 3,500 of John's sermons available for free, along with daily devotionals, a blog featuring articles by John and our staff, and much more. So go to gty.org, go there often, and take advantage of the free Bible study tools. Now for John MacArthur and the GTY staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for making Grace To You part of your day, and tune in tomorrow when John continues his study from 1 Thessalonians 5. The Bible-Driven Church, it's another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Friday's Grace To You.