Importunate Prayer, Divine Persistence, and the Transformation of the Human Soul

Between Fainting and Praying

There are two paths available to every human soul confronted with adversity. The first is fainting, the path of despondency, of giving way under pressure, of concluding that the weight of one's circumstances exceeds the reach of any remedy. The second is prayer, the path of persistent, importunate, never-ceasing engagement with the living God who holds all things in His hand. The Lord Jesus Christ, in the opening verse of the parable recorded in the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, establishes these as the only two live options before men: "And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint" (Luke 18:1). His instruction does not present prayer as one of many strategies a believer might employ in difficult seasons. It presents prayer as the singular governing discipline of a life rightly ordered before God, and it presents fainting, the abandonment of that discipline, as the definitive posture of failure.

There is an observation to make first about the architecture of human existence: life consists of two distinct yet overlapping realities, the seen and the unseen, the material and the spiritual. To live without an adequate framework for either dimension is to live badly. To neglect the spiritual dimension in favour of the material is to misread the deeper forces that shape visible outcomes. To neglect the material in favour of an undisciplined spirituality is to fail in one's creaturely responsibilities. The wisdom of God, the ḥokmah that ordered creation itself, is the faculty by which these two realities are held in appropriate balance. And it is prayer that most fundamentally connects a human being to that wisdom, opening the channels by which the life of God flows into the life of man.

Prayer, in the fullest theological sense, is not a circumstantial activity triggered by need. It is ontological, rooted in the very nature and design of the human being as a creature made for communion with God. Persistent prayer is therefore not a technique for accelerating divine response; it is the form of life in which God intends human beings to inhabit their existence. Within that persistent engagement, three virtues are operative: consistency, the faithfulness that shows up; persistency, the intensity that refuses to soften its appeal; and tenacity, the endurance that does not abandon the post regardless of how long the silence persists. These three virtues, modelled in the widow of Luke 18, are what the Lord draws our attention to when He says that men ought always to pray and not to faint.

I. The Architecture of Reality: Navigating the Seen and Unseen

Any adequate theology of prayer must begin with a theology of reality: specifically, the recognition that the world in which human beings move is not exhausted by what the senses perceive. Scripture is unambiguous that there exists an unseen order of being that exerts direct influence upon the visible outcomes of human life. The Apostle Paul states this plainly in the second letter to the Corinthians: "For we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:18). The unseen realm is not a peripheral consideration for those who are serious about living well in the seen world; it is, in fact, the deeper causal layer beneath the surface of events.

This has practical consequences of enormous weight. When the Lord Jesus warned Simon Peter, "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat" (Luke 22:31), Peter had no independent access to that intelligence. He did not know that an adversarial conspiracy was in motion against him. He could not perceive it by observation of his external circumstances. The warning came through a source that transcended the seen: the Lord Himself, whose insight penetrates the hidden operations of all worlds. This is not an isolated incident in the narrative of Scripture; it is, rather, illustrative of a pervasive principle, namely, that unseen forces, both divine and adversarial, are active participants in the unfolding of human life. To be ignorant of this is not neutrality; it is vulnerability.

The appropriate response to this dual-layered reality is not anxiety but wisdom, the divine wisdom that the Proverbs identify as the principle by which both the world and the life of the individual were built. There must be a proper framework for understanding the spiritual dimension of existence and a proper framework for discharging one's responsibilities in the material dimension. When these frameworks are absent or imbalanced, distortion results, an over-spiritualisation that produces passivity, or an over-materialisation that produces a secular blindness to the deeper causes of one's life. The goal of a genuinely biblical anthropology is the integration of both: the spiritual informing and governing the material, the material being the arena in which spiritual obedience is expressed and tested.

Prayer is precisely this point of integration. It is the practice through which the human soul deliberately orients itself toward the unseen, acknowledges its dependence upon it, and invites its governing force into the visible circumstances of daily life. Far from being a retreat from material responsibility, prayer is the most materially consequential act a human being can perform, for it opens the channel between the human agent and the omniscient, omnipotent God who holds the full scope of both realities in His hand.

II. The Wisdom That Builds: Proverbs 24:3–4 and the Interior Causes of Exterior Deficiency

One of the most concentrated declarations in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament bears directly on this. The writer of Proverbs declares: "Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding is it established: And by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches" (Proverbs 24:3–4). The Hebrew term rendered "wisdom" here is ḥokmah, skilful wisdom, the practical intelligence that produces right outcomes in the real world. It is not merely theoretical knowledge; it is the capacity to apply right understanding to the construction of a life.

The theological weight of this passage rests in its identification of all acquisition, material, relational, spiritual, as derivative from interior virtues. The house is built through wisdom. It is established through understanding. Its chambers are filled through knowledge. This means that the external condition of a man's life, whether his house stands or collapses, whether his chambers are furnished or bare, is a reflection of the presence or absence of these interior qualities. External deficiency is not, in the first instance, a deficiency of resources or opportunity; it is a deficiency of the inner capacity required to produce and sustain the outward life.

This is a radical reorientation of the common instinct that blames circumstance for failure. If there are empty chambers in a man's life, areas of financial lack, relational poverty, spiritual barrenness, unresolved illness or limitation, the first diagnostic question is not about what is missing in the external world but about what is absent in the internal one. What wisdom is lacking? What understanding has not yet been established? What knowledge has not yet been acquired? Because the world itself was built by the wisdom of God. "The LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens; By his knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew" (Proverbs 3:19–20). Every dimension of created reality was constructed from the inside out, from wisdom outward into form. The same principle governs the construction of a human life.

This also means that no human being is born a failure. All failures are made, which means all successes can likewise be made. At any point in a man's history, a reversal is possible, not through external luck or the random bestowing of advantage, but through the acquisition of the wisdom, understanding, and knowledge that are the true foundations of every house. And the primary avenue through which such wisdom is received is not academic study alone but prayerful communion with God, who is Himself the source of all ḥokmah. "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him" (James 1:5). The invitation to ask is also, implicitly, an invitation to pray.

III. Brokenness as the Instrument of Divine Formation

One of the most demanding affirmations here is the necessity of brokenness as a precondition for the experience of God's transforming work. The logic is counterintuitive to a culture that identifies success with accumulation and progress with the avoidance of pain. Yet the Scriptures are consistent, from the narrative of the patriarchs to the epistles of Paul, in presenting the breaking of the human will and the humiliation of human self-sufficiency as the gateway through which the grace of God most powerfully enters.

The conversion of Saul of Tarsus is the central illustration of this principle. Saul was a man of formidable will and conviction, "a Pharisee of the Pharisees" (Philippians 3:5), a persecutor of the church, a man who had stood present and consenting at the stoning of Stephen (Acts 8:1). His reputation as an agent of destruction against the followers of Christ was so established that when God directed Ananias to seek him out in Damascus, Ananias responded with open apprehension: "Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem" (Acts 9:13). The divine response was unequivocal: "Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me" (Acts 9:15). The hardest man in the narrative, the most resistant, the most violent opponent of the gospel, was the chosen vessel. And his transformation required nothing less than a direct encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, an experience that left him physically blind, prostrate on the ground, stripped of every presumption about his own righteousness and capacity.

This is the anatomy of divine formation: the encounter with the grace of God that does not merely adjust a man but breaks and remakes him. Metamorphosis, a term deliberately biological, drawn from the transformation of one form of life into another entirely different one, is the theological standard, not mere improvement. Paul himself invokes this language when he writes: "And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2). The Greek word for "transformed" is metamorphoō, the same root from which we derive our English word. It speaks of an alteration so fundamental that the original form is no longer recognisable in the product. This is what God intends for every human soul who enters into sustained engagement with Him through prayer and surrender.

The broken and contrite spirit, which David identifies in Psalm 51 as the sacrifice that God will not despise, is not a posture of humiliation for its own sake. It is the condition of openness. A vessel that is already full cannot receive; a life that is already self-sufficient has no space for the fullness of God. Brokenness creates the interior space into which God's wisdom, grace, and transforming power can be poured. And it must be observed, with pastoral candour, that God often engineers the circumstances of hardship in a person's life precisely in order to bring about this brokenness. The hardships of life are not random punishments or evidence of divine indifference. They are frequently the instruments of divine love, the means by which a caring Father breaks the hardened self-will of a child in order to open that child to a far richer inheritance than they could have received had they remained unbroken.

IV. Prayer as Ontological Necessity: The Nature of a Life Before God

It is against this backdrop, the dual nature of reality, the interior genesis of all acquisition, and the transforming work of grace mediated through brokenness, that we arrive at the central assertion: prayer is not a circumstantial activity. It is ontological. It belongs to the nature of what it means to be a human being before God, not merely to the repertoire of strategies a believer may deploy when things go badly.

The Lord's introduction to the parable of the persistent widow establishes this immediately: "And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint" (Luke 18:1). The word "always" is decisive. It does not mean "frequently" or "when moved to do so" or "in times of crisis." It means without cessation, continuously, as a permanent feature of the life well-lived. The Apostle Paul amplifies this in his first letter to the Thessalonians: "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17). This is not a counsel of impossible idealism. It is an instruction about the basic orientation of a life that acknowledges, at every moment, its absolute dependence upon God.

There is a sharp and theologically important contrast between prayer and fainting. To faint, and the Greek word ekkakeō carries the sense of losing heart, becoming weary, withdrawing from the effort, is not simply a moment of weakness. It is the assumption of a trajectory of disengagement. It is the choice, whether conscious or gradual, to cease the continuous engagement with God and to conclude that circumstances either do not respond to such engagement or that God does not hear. This conclusion is a theological error dressed in the garb of practical realism. It mistakes the silence of God for His absence, and it mistakes the delay of the answer for the denial of the request.

Prayer, properly understood, is the surrendering of one's personal scope of competency, which is limited, partial, and bounded by all the constraints of creaturely finitude, to the intelligence of God, which is infinite, omniscient, and unbounded by any circumstance. A man who prays acknowledges, in every moment of prayer, that his perspective on his own life is radically smaller than God's perspective on it. He acknowledges that what he perceives as the best outcome may not be the best outcome, and that the divine wisdom, which built the cosmos itself, is more than adequate to navigate the labyrinthine complexity of one human life. Prayer is therefore, at its deepest level, an act of epistemic humility: the recognition that one does not know what one most needs to know, and that the God who does know is both willing and able to act.

A striking image from the early chapters of Genesis illuminates this. Before the rain fell upon the earth, there was a prior lack: "for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground" (Genesis 2:5). There was no man. And because there was no man, the ground was untilled and the rain did not fall. The divine provision was available, rain was not withheld out of scarcity, but the human participation in the divine project had not yet been secured. Prayer is how a human being signals his participation in God's project over his life. It is how he makes himself present to the work of God. When a man ceases to pray, he absents himself from that project. And the rain, the provision, the breakthrough, the transformation, does not fall, not because God is unwilling, but because the human partner in the enterprise has removed himself from his post.

This is the mystery of the divine-human relationship: God is sovereign, but He is not a unilateral actor in human affairs. He creates, He governs, He ordains, and He also waits. He waits for men to pray. He waits for the petition that signals the alignment of the human will with His. "God cannot and will not do it without you": this is not a limitation of divine power. It is an expression of divine dignity: the decision to honour the human being as a genuine participant in the redemptive economy rather than a passive recipient of unilateral divine action.

V. The Parable of the Persistent Widow: Importunity as Judicial Strategy

The parable that the Lord deploys to illustrate the necessity and method of persistent prayer is remarkable for its structural clarity and its frank acknowledgment of resistance. There was, in a certain city, a judge who feared neither God nor man, a description of moral and judicial corruption that the text offers without apology. And there was in that same city a widow who had a case against an adversary and needed the judge's authority to avenge her. The judge refused. She came again. He refused again. She persisted. And at last, the judge, not moved by justice, not moved by compassion, not moved by any consideration of the merits of her case, was moved by her persistence alone. He declared: "Though I fear not God, nor regard man; Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me" (Luke 18:4–5).

The parable is constructed to operate by contrast: if an unjust, God-fearing, man-disregarding judge will ultimately yield to persistence, how much more will the just and loving God who regards His people honour their sustained petition? But the parable does something more than establish this contrast. It models, in the figure of the widow, a precise understanding of what persistent prayer accomplishes in the economy of divine attention.

The widow's method was not legal argumentation. She brought no new evidence. She engaged no advocate. She deployed no persuasive rhetoric beyond the singular fact of her continued presence. Every time she appeared before the judge, she said the same thing: avenge me of mine adversary. It was the repetition itself that constituted her strategy. And the remarkable consequence of this follows: by coming again and again, she imprinted herself in the mind of the judge. A single appearance is forgotten. Two appearances may be remembered briefly. But the fifth, the tenth, the thirtieth appearance creates an indelible impression. The woman's case was no longer confined to the formal boundaries of the courtroom. It lived with the judge. It interrupted his other activities. It made itself felt even when she was not present. Her persistence turned her petition into a presence that could not be escaped.

This is the logic of importunate prayer in the divine economy. To pray always, to return to God with the same petition, day after day, month after month, year after year if necessary, is not, as some traditions have suggested, a display of distrust in the efficacy of a single prayer. It is the forging of a memory. It is the inscription of the petitioner's need into the register of divine attention in a manner that is qualitatively different from the occasional request. The Lord Jesus himself, in Gethsemane, demonstrates this principle. The account in Matthew records that he prayed the same prayer three times, using "the same words" (Matthew 26:44), an action that cannot be understood as informational repetition, since God does not need to be told a thing three times to comprehend it. It is importunity. It is the intensity of a soul pressing its case before the Father with the full force of its need, returning to the same place, the same words, the same petition.

An illustrative narrative from outside the canon bears repeating: an account of a pastor in Germany who prayed for revival. He began with three people in his congregation. The answer did not come. He prayed. One person was added in a year. He continued to pray the same prayer, with the same intensity, year after year. For eight years, the outward fruit of his prayer was minimal, one addition per year, a harvest too small to be called revival by any conventional measure. He did not stop. At the end of eight years, the grace of God broke through and a great multitude came to Christ. Eight years of faithfulness, eight years of consistency and tenacity, eight years of imprinting a petition before God. The breakthrough, when it came, was proportionate to the prayer that preceded it, and the prayer that preceded it was shaped by the very quality of persistence that the parable of the widow models.

There is a sobering point to be made about the sovereign dimension of prayer's timing: there are petitions that will require decades before their unfolding. There are prayers that a man will carry to his grave without seeing their answer in his lifetime. This is not evidence of divine indifference or of some failure in the one who prays. It is evidence of a sovereign wisdom that accounts for factors invisible to the finite mind. The Apostle Paul observed that the wisdom of God is beyond the capacity of human comprehension: "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!" (Romans 11:33). What the believer is required to concern himself with is not the unfolding, which belongs to God, but the engagement. The invitation to approach has been extended. The instruction to pray always has been given. The response of faithful persistence is therefore not a negotiation with God over the timing of His answers; it is an act of trust in His character and His sovereign wisdom.

VI. Three Virtues of the Prayer Life: Consistency, Persistency, Tenacity

Three terms must be carefully distinguished that are often used interchangeably but which carry distinct and non-overlapping theological content. The life of persistent prayer is shaped by all three, and the absence of any one of them produces a deficiency that undermines the whole.

Consistency is the virtue of faithfulness in diligence. It refers to the showing up, the regular, uninterrupted, habitual engagement with prayer that does not depend on the emotional state of the one who prays. A consistent prayer life is one in which prayer has become so deeply woven into the pattern of daily existence that its absence feels unnatural. Consistency is what the psalmist describes when he writes of praying evening, and morning, and at noon (Psalm 55:17). It is the discipline that creates the framework within which the other virtues can operate. Without consistency, there is no regularity of presence before God; and without regularity, there is no imprinting of the petition in the manner the widow's parable models. Consistency is faithfulness. It is the opposite of the spiritual opportunism that brings requests to God in moments of acute need and withdraws into silence when life becomes comfortable.

Persistency is the virtue of intensity in diligence. Where consistency addresses the frequency of prayer, persistency addresses its quality, the pressing weight and fervour with which the soul leans into its petition. The persistent pray-er is not merely present; he is urgent. He brings to his prayer the full force of his conviction that God is able, that the petition is just, and that the answer is possible. James describes this quality when he writes that "the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much" (James 5:16). The Greek term rendered "effectual fervent" is energeomai, carrying the sense of energy in operation, of force being actively exerted. Persistency is the energy component of prayer. It is what distinguishes a formal recitation from a genuine cry; what distinguishes going through the motions of devotional habit from actually pressing the matter before the throne of grace.

Tenacity is the virtue of endurance, the capacity to sustain both consistency and persistency across extended and often discouraging spans of time. It is the most demanding of the three, and in many ways the most essential, because it is tenacity that is specifically tested by the silence of God, the delay of the answer, and the seemingly unchanged reality of the circumstances being prayed over. Tenacity is the capacity to hold a petition before God for eight years, as the German pastor did, without reducing the fervency of the prayer or concluding that the absence of visible results constitutes divine rejection. It is the endurance of the widow, who appears before the judge not twice or three times but as many times as necessary until the answer is granted.

There is a common failure in this regard: the tendency, when confronted with an intractable problem, to spend significant energy in an autonomous state of worry rather than in the sustained engagement of prayer. The mind that worries is not passive; it is intensely active, circling the problem, rehearsing its dimensions, imagining its worst consequences, re-examining it from every angle. The energy deployed in worry is, in many cases, the same energy that could transform the situation if redirected toward prayer. The difference lies in the direction of the engagement: worry faces inward toward the problem, while prayer faces upward toward the One who holds the solution. Every problem contains within itself the seed of its own solution, and there is no problem to which there is no answer, whether natural or divine. The path to that answer is not anxious rumination but the disciplined, consistent, persistent, tenacious engagement of the soul with God in prayer.

VII. Tongues and the Language of Mystery: 1 Corinthians 14 and the Self-Edification of the Spirit

In the context of a gathering devoted to prayer, we turn to the fourteenth chapter of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians to address the specific role that the gift of tongues plays in personal spiritual formation and in the corporate discipline of prayer. The passage merits quotation in full for its theological density: "Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy. For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries: But he that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification, and exhortation, and comfort. He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself; but he that prophesieth edifieth the church. I would that ye all spake with tongues, but rather that ye prophesied" (1 Corinthians 14:1–5).

Paul's argument in this passage is structured around a contrast between two charismatic operations, tongues and prophecy, that are equal in their respective spheres of operation but directed toward different audiences. Prophecy, as the revelation of the mind of God, is directed outward toward the community: it "speaketh unto men to edification, and exhortation, and comfort" (1 Corinthians 14:3). Tongues, by contrast, are directed upward toward God: "he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God" (1 Corinthians 14:2). The one who speaks in tongues is not communicating to an audience of human hearers; he is addressing God directly, in a register that bypasses the mediating structures of human language and cognitive comprehension.

What is being spoken in tongues? Paul specifies: "mysteries," the same Greek word (mystēria) that the Apostle uses elsewhere to describe the hidden councils of God, the plans and purposes of the divine wisdom that are concealed from the natural mind but disclosed to the Spirit. The one who prays in tongues is therefore articulating, through the instrumentality of the Holy Spirit, the very mysteries of God's counsel as they pertain to his own life and situation. He may not comprehend the content of what he speaks, "for no man understandeth him," but his spirit, by the operation of the Spirit of God, is giving expression to those deep things that the natural mind cannot access. This is the profound complementarity between tongues and the Spirit's intercession described in the eighth chapter of Romans: "Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered" (Romans 8:26).

The pastoral implication follows with directness: tongues are what prophecy is to the church. Both are equal in the dignity and power of their operation, but their arenas are distinct. Prophecy lifts the congregation, and it can take a despairing soul from the lowest point of discouragement and suddenly infuse it with hope, meaning, and the consciousness of divine purpose. Tongues do the same for the individual. The one who prays in tongues is edified, built up, comforted, exalted, not because he understands the content of his prayer but because the Spirit is active in the utterance, doing in his interior life what prophecy does for the gathered community. "He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself" (1 Corinthians 14:4).

This has considerable significance for the theology of prayer. Persistent prayer, prayer that continues through seasons of discouragement, silence, and uncertainty, requires a source of interior strengthening that does not depend upon the progress of visible circumstances. If a man's ability to sustain his prayer life is conditioned by whether he feels encouraged, or whether the circumstances of his life are improving, or whether he senses that God is near, then his prayer life will be fragile and episodic at best. The gift of tongues addresses precisely this vulnerability: it provides a means of self-edification that is available in the very act of prayer itself, independent of the external circumstance and independent of the cognitive comprehension of the one who prays. To pray in tongues is, in this sense, to pray with a built-in reservoir of interior strengthening, the Spirit simultaneously articulating the mysteries of God's purpose and building up the one through whom those articulations are flowing.

Paul's declaration, "I would that ye all spake with tongues" (1 Corinthians 14:5), is therefore not a casual aside but a pastoral endorsement of a practice that he clearly regards as of great benefit to the individual believer's interior life. In the context of a prayer gathering, where the aim is the sustained and fervid engagement of the whole person with God, tongues become not a curious peripheral phenomenon but a tool of extraordinary utility: they connect the human spirit directly to the divine, bypass the limitations of natural language in articulating the depths of need and petition, and simultaneously fortify the one who employs them for the very work of continued prayer.

Conclusion: Always Praying, Never Fainting, the Grammar of a Life Before God

The argument traced here, from the dual nature of reality through the wisdom principles of Proverbs, through the necessity of brokenness, through the ontological character of prayer, through the exegesis of the parable of the persistent widow, through the distinctions between consistency, persistency, and tenacity, and finally through the charismatic resources of tongues and the Spirit's intercession, arrives at a single, irreducible conclusion: the man or woman who prays always, and does not faint, is the man or woman for whom God will work.

The testimony of Scripture from beginning to end is that God operates within a framework of human participation. He did not create man to be a passive recipient of unilateral divine action; He created man to be a partner, a tiller of the ground, a namer of the animals, a steward of the earth, a co-labourer with the Spirit. Prayer is the primary mode of that participation at the spiritual level. It is how the human will aligns itself with the divine purpose. It is how the petition becomes a presence. It is how the widow forces her case into the permanent consciousness of the judge. And the divine Judge, unlike the unjust one of the parable, does not yield reluctantly after years of importunity; He yields gladly, and He shapes the one who prays through the very process of the yielding.

The consequences of prayer extend far beyond the answers received. God intends the experience of prayer itself, its sustained engagement, its seasons of apparent silence, its demands upon the will and the patience, to be a crucible of transformation. In the process of praying always and not fainting, a man is broken of self-reliance. He is trained in the discipline of sustained attention. He is formed in the virtues of consistency, persistency, and tenacity. He is, through the operation of the Holy Spirit, remade into a vessel of greater capacity. The answers God grants are wonderful; the character He forms in the one who prays for them is more wonderful still.

"Now I know that the LORD saveth his anointed; he will hear him from his holy heaven with the saving strength of his right hand" (Psalm 20:6). This is the confidence that sustains persistent prayer, not the calculation of probabilities, not the measurement of past results, not the assessment of the worthiness of the one who asks. It is simply the knowledge that the God to whom we pray is a hearing God, a saving God, a God whose right hand is the saving strength of the universe. He will hear. And the hearing, when it comes, will be worth every season of prayer that preceded it. The invitation, therefore, is clear and the instruction unambiguous: men ought always to pray, and not to faint.