Men Ought Always to Pray and Not to Faint

There is a man who has said the same sentence out loud in his truck, on the same road, most mornings, for fourteen years.

He can tell you the wording, because it has not changed. He can tell you where on the road he usually says it, which is a bend about four miles out.

And he told me, with some embarrassment, that in about the eleventh year it started to feel absurd.

Not untrue. He was careful to make that distinction. He still believes the thing he is asking for is a good thing to ask for. What had changed is that saying it had begun to feel like a man talking to himself in a truck, and he could not shake the sense that he was doing something faintly ridiculous.

That is a very specific kind of tiredness, and I have found it almost impossible to talk anybody out of. What I have found is a parable that Luke tells us the purpose of before he tells it, which is not something he usually does.

Luke tells you what it is for first

Most parables arrive without a label. This one arrives with the purpose attached before the story starts.

And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint. (Luke 18:1, King James Version)

To this end. Luke is telling us in advance what the story is about, which means we do not have to guess.

And notice what the stated purpose actually is. Not that men ought to pray harder. Not that persistence produces results. The purpose is that they ought always to pray and not to faint, and fainting is a word about exhaustion rather than about failure of nerve.

So the parable is aimed at tiredness. It was told to people who were going to get tired, by somebody who knew they would.

You are the person that parable was told for, and Luke names the audience before the story starts (Luke 18:1). The same Spirit is the one who keeps somebody praying through the years where the praying has stopped feeling like anything.

The contrast, not the comparison

Here is the part that gets preached backwards, and getting it right changes everything.

The judge in that story is a bad judge. Luke says so plainly: he feared not God, neither regarded man. He gives the widow what she asks for purely to stop her coming back.

Most people hear the parable and conclude that God is like that judge and that persistence eventually wears Him down.

Read what Jesus actually says next.

And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? (Luke 18:7)

Shall not God. It is a contrast. The whole force of it is: if even a corrupt judge who cares about nobody will act, how much more the One who is nothing like him.

That is the same argument He makes about the father and the fish and the stone, and it always runs upward from the worse example to the better.

You are not wearing anybody down, and the argument in that parable runs upward from a bad judge to God rather than comparing them (Luke 18:7), and it is the Spirit who makes the difference between those two readings something a person can feel in their own praying.

Which means the repetition is not the mechanism. The repetition is what a person does because they are talking to somebody, and people who are talking to somebody say the same things more than once.

You have been repeating something the way people repeat things to people they love, and Luke 11:13 makes the same upward argument from an ordinary father to God, and the Spirit is the one who keeps a repetition from hardening into a formula.

The clause nobody quotes

There are four words at the end of that verse that I have almost never heard preached, and they are the honest ones.

Though he bear long with them.

Jesus says it Himself, in the middle of His own parable about praying. He acknowledges, out loud, that there is a bearing long. He does not explain it, He does not apologize for it, and He does not give a reason.

That is worth having, because it means the delay is not a surprise to the one being prayed to, and it is not evidence of anything, and Jesus put it in the story on purpose.

You are inside something Jesus named in the parable itself, and He did not offer a reason for it and neither will I (Luke 18:7). The Spirit is the one who sustains somebody through a bearing long that Scripture acknowledges without explaining.

And the psalms say the same thing in the form of a question that never gets answered in the psalm.

How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? (Psalm 13:1)

How long. That is in the songbook, unanswered, and the man who wrote it went on writing.

And this belongs here plainly, because this category reaches people in real danger. Where the thing being prayed about is dangerous right now, for the person praying or for anybody else, that is not for an article to carry. Tell a person today: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.