Matthew Henry comments, ‘This parable has its key hanging at the door; the drift and design of it are prefixed.’ Prayer is a battle, and we must not underestimate the difficulty of the battle. If we are not ready for a prolonged struggle, then we will cease to pray, and we will obtain nothing from the Lord. Why is prayer so hard? Can’t anyone utter words that present their requests to God on high, and then simply go their way, content that their request will be handled in due time? No, that is not real prayer. Prayer is an engagement with a person, not simply the laying out of requests before some heavenly bureaucracy. As we come to prayer we must consider who our prayers are addressed to, who it is we want to be heard by. God is invisible, and yet we are making our requests to him, and seeking an answer from him personally.
There is always faith involved in prayer. But it is not simply faith that he is there, nor just faith that he hears our prayers; it is also faith that he is receptive to our prayers, sympathetic to them, and has good will towards those who petition him. We come to the Lord who knows all things, who knows what we are, who knows that our sin has disqualified us from asking him anything. We cannot come therefore, unless we come to a merciful God who sits upon a throne of grace, and deals with his creatures on the basis of grace. He gives good gifts even to his enemies, but that is occasional, and there is no regular and confident asking in them. In order to receive God’s gifts regularly, we must enter into a relationship with him, a praying relationship in which we come to a heavenly Father who loves all of his children and answers them.
There is always forgiveness required by those who come to God before they can ask anything. We may not always start our prayers with a request for pardon, but it will be in the background from the start, even if it comes later in the prayer. We are unworthy to receive anything from him, and so we ask for what we do not deserve to have. How then can we ask on our own merits? We cannot; we must ask in the name of another, and for his sake. It is not mere verbiage that we close our prayer by asking ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, for his sake’. That is the only ground on which we can receive anything from the Lord. Christ has earned the answer to all our prayers. And yet God is not a reluctant giver to his children. He delights to answer prayer, and yet there is still a battle to be fought, and it is the will of God that it should be so.
God insists on prayer. Conversion is, among other things, the beginning of the life of prayer. Prayer is deeply involved in coming to Christ in the first place, in seeking him and finding him, and it continues and grows throughout the Christian life. The believer is in a relationship of dependence on God, and he has designed that relationship so that we are obliged to ask him constantly for our needs. So many things that we need are beyond our ability to supply. We ask him for the basic necessities of physical life, but more importantly we ask him for spiritual benefits. We follow the topics of the summary Lord’s Prayer. We ask for the advance of his kingdom, the exaltation of his name, universal compliance with his will, the understanding of his word which only his Spirit can supply. We ask for strength to serve him, for progress in holiness and the Spirit’s work within our hearts. We intercede for the lost around us. We pray for the restraint of our enemies, and for kindly providences. There is no bureaucracy between us and God; each one comes directly to him with their requests. Christ is the only mediator between God and man, and he himself is divine.
This exhortation implies there may be a delay in God’s answer. Will we persist, or will be give up at the first hurdle? Faith is seen as overcoming in prayer, for it prevails over many discouragements. It implies that prayer is a great struggle. We must remind ourselves again and again that God has invited us to come, commanded us to come, promised that our prayers will be heard when they are according to his will. We need to set all this encouragements against the discouragement which the devil loads upon us. It also implies that the answer will come eventually, though we are tested first. Perseverance will be rewarded if we do not lose sight of the goodness of God. We must persist, because there is no one else to whom we can go. The petitioner must care deeply about whether they receive an answer. They are not bringing trivial matter to God in prayer; the seeker is praying for his very life, his eternal soul. Sometime we receive immediate answers to our prayer. Sometimes God waits to answer, as he did with Abraham, for reasons that he does not necessarily reveal to us.