“Rejoice in hope, be patient in affliction, be persistent in prayer.”
Romans 12:12
Prayer is God’s path to hope, joy, endurance, and love for those who are His.
The word “persistent” in this context doesn’t mean that we are expected to pray every minute of the day. Yet, we are to persevere in it. Stay at it. Be devoted to it. Be habitual. It’s the opposite of random, occasional, sporadic, or intermittent. In other words, Paul is calling all of us, as Christians, to make prayer a regular, habitual, recurring, disciplined part of our lives. We are to treat prayer the way we do eating, sleeping, or doing our job. How much attention do we pay to these activities? If we fail to nourish our bodies, or give them the proper rest, or take no pride in our work, we would be useless to those who depend on us.
Attention to our prayer life should be no different.
And what about our relationships? They, too, would suffer from a lack of focused attention.
Our most important relationship should be with our Heavenly Father. Scripture calls us to a life of regular, planned meetings with God. We do this through prayers of praise for who He is, thanking Him for what He has done, asking Him for help, and pleading the causes of those we love. This should also include intercessory prayers for those in the world we may not know but are still called to love—our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Affliction is the soil in which we’ve been planted in this fallen world. “…You will have suffering in this world. Be courageous! I have conquered the world,” John 16:33.
Jesus Christ broke into our suffering and became our unshakeable hope. He became a man and embraced all our suffering. He chose it. He carried it. And in his death and resurrection, he defeated it. All of it—Christ has already defeated the enemy by dying in our place and rising from the dead.
In this triumph, he rescued all those who trust him—freedom from sin, freedom from Satan, and freedom from sickness, partially now and perfectly in the age to come. In other words, Jesus Christ has become the foundation of our hope. And He is now the goal of our hope.
How will you remain hopeful in this broken world? What will you do to keep Christ as your treasure? What will you do to make your heart see and savor your heavenly inheritance as more precious than all the pleasures of sin?
Answer? Pray.
Let’s lift Paul’s prayer for ourselves, our family, our friends, and our church:
“O God, awaken and sustain my hope in you. Be my treasure now. And be my inheritance always. Please open the eyes of my heart to see the wonder that you are. Grant me the spiritual taste buds to taste and see and savor that all you are for us in Jesus is better than all the world. And so sustain my hope. And may this hope sustain my joy in tribulation, and may this joy sustain my endurance, and may this endurance sustain my love for people, and may my love make you irresistibly attractive to the world.”
