This blog post is in response to a question that was posed from the blog post The Nature of Prayer (Revisited).

The question asked was:

I am just wondering is it okay to keep asking for the same request, (ie. salvation for a loved one), or should we just ask once and believe it is done and then thank God for what we asked for believing that is was done.

That’s a very good question. And I think the question stems from some scriptures that may appear to contradict each other. So, let’s take a look at some of them to try to clear things up.

Persistently Asking

The idea of “persistently asking” comes from Jesus’ words in Luke 11:9-10, to “ask, seek and knock.” Jesus said these words in the context of the parable of a neighbor coming to his sleeping friend’s house late at night to ask for some extra food. Jesus says that even though the sleeping man won’t get up to help just because he is a friend, he will do it because of the other man’s persistence.

Furthermore, when Jesus then says to “ask, seek and knock”, in the original Greek, the tenses indicate a “continual” asking, seeking and knocking. In other words, “Ask, and keep on asking, seek and keep on seeking, knock and keep on knocking”.

So, by the context of Jesus story, and the tenses of the original scriptures, we see that it is not only ok but advisable to persist in prayer.

So now the question: Does all this persistence contradict our action of “believing”?

Believing

The idea of “believing to receive” comes from (among other places) Mark 11:24. “Whatever you ask for, believe you have received it, and it will be yours.”

Of course, the key word here is “believe” or the phrase “believe you have received it”. What does it actually mean, here to believe?

What does it ever mean to truly believe something?… It means to be absolutely convinced. To have no doubt in your heart. To have a definite expectation of a coming action. For example, I could say, “I believe I just walked out of the room.”… How do I know? Because I just did it! I was there. Or I could say, “I believe I will go to the store tonight.” Yet, even though I haven’t gone yet, I have every expectation that is what I will do.

So how does this relate to our prayers?

Such “believing” in prayer is to be our goal.

When we pray for something, do we immediately believe it? We might, but many times I think we do not. What we sometimes call ” believing” may just be a form of “spiritual hoping”. We may even fool ourselves into thinking we believe out of a religious fear of appearing “unspiritual” or “unbelieving”.

“Believing”, however, is not a wishy-washy word. It’s either a yes or a no. We either do believe or we do not. We can’t “sort-of believe” something. That is not belief.

In a case such as this, to ask God again for a request is perfectly acceptable, and even expected. As we pray, study the word, and commune with God, the answers to our prayers become more clear to us (or we could say “more believable”). We are to eventually grow to a level of confident expectation that our prayer will be (or is) definitely answered. Sometimes that assurance comes immediately, but sometimes, it does not.

Don’t let this hinder you

It’s important that we don’t get down on ourselves for what we perceive as a lack of belief. The Bible is full of great people who struggled with imperfect faith.

It is equally important to not be so spiritually arrogant that we view anything less than immediate, complete belief as something to be looked down upon as inferior.

We need to take the scriptures as a whole and put them together as a complete revelation to a problem.

I hope this answers your question to some extent. We’ll continue to expound this topic in the coming weeks in our message series Prayer Changes Everything.