Pray Without Ceasing

If you want your prayer to be answered without fail you must pray without ceasing. Those who get tired after praying for a time are lacking in either humility or confidence, and so they do not deserve to be heard. Their attitude is that God “owes” them and that their prayer should be obeyed instantly as if they were giving out orders to God! God resists the proud but bestows His favors upon the humble. We show very little trust in God’s goodness when we give up our prayers so quickly and take delay for an absolute refusal!

If we begin to really understand how far God’s goodness extends we will never believe that we have been refused or that He wishes to take away our hope. Rather, the more He makes us keep on asking for something we want, the more confident we should feel that we shall eventually obtain it. In fact, the only time we should begin to doubt that our prayers have been heard is when we notice that we have given up and stopped praying!

For example, if after a year we discover that we are praying just as hard as when we first started, then we shouldn’t doubt the success of our efforts. Instead of losing courage after such a long delay, we should rejoice because we can be certain that our desires will be all the more fully satisfied for the length of time we prayed. Remember how it took Saint Monica sixteen years to obtain the conversion of Saint Augustine, but the conversion was over and above what she had prayed for. She prayed that her son’s incontinence would be checked by marriage, and instead she had the joy of seeing him embrace a life of chastity! She only prayed that he be baptized and become a Christian, but she lived to see him become a bishop! She prayed that God turn him away from heresy, and God made him a pillar of the Church and its champion against heretics.

What do you suppose would have happened if Saint Monica would have given up after a couple of years, or after ten or twelve years? Her prayers seemingly were getting no results and her son grew worse instead of better for so many years. She would have done her son an injustice by ceasing to pray for him! She would have thrown away her own happiness, and deprived the world of one of the greatest Christian thinkers!

In Christ,

Rev. Jeffery A. Fasching