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by Charlie Wolcott

When Jesus described prayer, there was one word or term that He felt was so important to prayer that He gave two parables in describing it. That word is called “importunity.” Importunity is a relentless effort and refusal to quit until the job is done. In more modern Christianity, the term is called “praying through.” I wrote on this topic in my prayer series several years ago, but it’s something that is flat out not practiced among most Christians today. I am guilty of not having practiced prayer to learn this myself. But God is pressing on me to get back into the prayer closet, and as I am writing this post and as you are reading this post, I am in a transition period where I am able to restructure things so I can make prayer a priority once again. I have made Bible reading and study a priority, but I need to make sure prayer is there too.

Jesus gave two stories of praying with importunity: the first is a man who had a guest come at midnight, but he had no food to prepare for him. Hospitality was a huge thing, and it was considered shameful if food could not be offered. So the man goes to a friend who has bread and knocks at midnight, asking for bread. The friend finally gets up not because he was a friend but because of the friend’s importunity and refusal to quit knocking.

The other parable was a widow whose judge was unjust and kept putting her off on her case. She kept knocking and knocking, and finally, the judge granted what she wanted just to get her off him.

In both cases, Jesus gave people who did NOT want to help the person. If a person who does NOT want to help in such situations finally does, how much more so does God want to help when He does want to help us in our situation? The problem is that answers to prayer often take time to carry through. Answers to prayer rarely happen instantly, and the few times they really do are because of a lifestyle of prayer and having already “won the battle” before the moment is needed.

The Bible has many examples of importunistic prayer. The first example is Abraham’s pleading for Sodom. Abraham kept persisting and praying until he had gotten it down to ten people being righteous in the whole city. But then there is Jacob and his famous account of wrestling with God when he was 91 years old. Jacob refused to let go of God until he got what he wanted. God was pleased with this because that was an example of prayer – going with God nonstop until the answer comes. Elijah prayed seven times until rain came after winning the epic duel between prophets on Mt Carmel. The list goes on. But we are not to quit praying until the answer comes. That does not mean we neglect our duties, but it does mean we pray and pray and pray until victory comes.

There were times when Jesus prayed through the whole night, times Jesus simply wanted to “slip away” from his very busy ministry just to be with His Father, and other times where He had to do very intense business with God. Prayer was Jesus’ lifeline, and He did not quit praying until the job was done. I’ll reference this more next week with a different emphasis, but the clearest case of importunity and “praying through” that we are shown of Jesus was on the night He was betrayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus prayed like He had never prayed before with sorrow and emotion so intense that he sweated blood. He prayed until He won the battle that was waging on inside Him: to be obedient and go through the cross or for any other way to be provided. He prayed three times, and it was after the third time that Jesus finally won the battle and faced His “moment” head-on.

In this prayer, we see something else that goes with importunity: fervency. Fervency is an intense energy, particularly in prayer. If you go to an old house with wooden floors that was once occupied by a man of prayer, you may see two long grooves pressed into the wood. This was the kind of energy of a man of prayer, kneeling at his bedside and doing business with God. This wasn’t your casual 30-second prayer of thank-yous and blessings. This was where soldiers fought. It was said of David Brainerd that he woke up one morning to multiple feet of snow up in upper New York state or into Canada, and at dawn, he went to pray with the snow up to neck high or something like that. He knelt down in the snow, and when he left praying that evening, (yes, he prayed for the entire duration of the day), he had melted the snow all around his body from the intense heat of his body through prayer.

There is an intensity to fervent prayer that can only be described with Jacob wrestling with God: full-out combat. I am a fencer and an athlete, and I’ve seen some people do amazing things athletically. We’ve seen the action hero movies; we know soldiers and martial artists who are truly elite warriors. But none of them are able to fight like a prayer warrior. And I’m not even talking “War Room” material here. I am talking about a league that goes way above that. I am talking about a time of prayer that does two things at the same time: it completely wears you out because you have been in battle, but you’re also fully refreshed and able to take on anything. It’s a very strange paradox, and those who’ve been on the mission field, those who have been in ministry, those who did their battles on their knees, can testify of getting so tired of getting slapstick silly, yet having the energy to run a marathon. Prayer with fervency and importunity does this, and Jesus taught and showcased such unrelenting strength to get what was needed that no one had the courage to interrupt Him as He did so.

But there is another part of this type of praying that is absolutely vital: prayer is the practice of dependence upon God and denial of self. That will be for next week.

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