Audio When I first became a follower of Jesus, one of the most difficult things I had to learn to do was to pray. It is not that I needed to learn how to pray, or that prayer required some specific skill that I did not have, but I simply needed to learn of the necessity of prayer in my life. I had become accustomed to dealing with my problems and my needs with my own resources, and what I had to learn was that God was available to me, and desired for me to bring my concerns to Him and to dialogue with Him in the intimate fellowship of prayer. And of course, as I began to develop a discipline of prayer in my life, I began to encounter some challenges. The most seemingly insurmountable one was this: that though I brought my concerns to a God whom I believed heard my prayers, and was all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, my prayers seemed to often go unanswered. The problem of unanswered prayer became a great hindrance to my spiritual growth until I eventually learned that there is really no such thing as an unanswered prayer. God answers every prayer that we pray, but His answer is not always, “YES!” Just as a good and loving parent knows that the best thing for a child is to sometimes say “no” to the things the child asks for, I had to learn that my Heavenly Father was showing His lovingkindness and goodness to me in saying “NO!” to some of the things for which I prayed. But I also learned that there are times when God’s answer to our prayers is neither “yes” nor “no,” but “NOT YET!” Far from being an outright denial, God’s answer is sometimes merely a delayfor a variety of reasons. There are times when we are not yet ready to receive God’s answer and situations in which God’s timing requires a delay. And then there are times when His divine delay is because we have not yet persisted in prayer. Jesus told the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18:1-8, who came repeatedly to the unjust judge in her town, pleading for justice in her cause. Eventually, the unjust judge gave the widow what she asked for in order to get her off of his back. But the point of Jesus’ parable was not that we are able to wear God down to give in to us if we persist long enough. His point was that, if an unjust and unrighteous judge can eventually succumb to the persistent cries of a person in need, how much more willingly and eagerly will our Heavenly Father answer His own children when we cry out to Him. Luke tells us that Jesus told this parable “to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart.” In other words, an immediate “no,” or a prolonged delay in the answer to our prayers does not mean that we should cease praying about the matter, but that we should persist in prayer and not give up! Jesus concluded the parable by saying, “However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” Will He find that we have, by faith continued to persist in prayer for the concerns of our hearts, or will He find that we have given up on crying out to Him? It is not that persistence in prayer makes God more willing to answer us, but it is often the case that persistence in prayer helps us grow in our understanding of who God is, how He is at work, and what it is that He desires to do in our situation. And persistence in prayer also helps us to clarify in our own hearts and minds what it is that we are really longing to see God do. Persistence in prayer is essential, and we learn that throughout the Bible. The book of Habakkuk is really all about one man’s persistence in prayer. Unlike most of the other prophetic writings, Habakkuk is not filled with the prophet’s words from God to the people of his own or surrounding nations. Rather, Habbakuk is filled, for the most part, of the prophet’s words to God on behalf of his people. He has, if you will, invited us into his prayer closet, or perhaps left his prayer journal laying open for us to read. And as we observe Habakkuk in prayer, we find him wearing out his knees in persistent