Luke 18:1-5
“And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. 3 And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ 4 For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’”
One thing tech has caused is a sort of ADHD in mass. Even our most disciplined people barely rival schoolboys before the radio when it comes to focus and attention span. People write books about how to get in a state of “flow.” A state of flow is when you feel like you get a lot done in a short time. Time seems to elongate and you feel and are measurably more effective. My general thought is that states of flow were reached more frequently in the past because most work required close individual attention to details and everyone lived in their own mind not in the projection of someone else’s created content. We self-generated our own content without interruption for hours each day. As that was broken into smaller and smaller chunks by ever more entertaining and available technology the attention span shrank with it. I sent a link to a friend of a talk by a tech ideologist-billionaire I thought was worth the listen. I asked him a week later if he enjoyed it. He said, “Man, I am ashamed to admit that TikTok has ruined me. I can’t listen to anything that long.” The video was about an hour.
If we are not careful one of the things we can lose (are losing or have lost, the jury is still out) is persistence. It is hard to be persistent without the ability to focus. The loss of the ability to focus will bring the loss of the ability to persist or endure in a task as sure as thunder follows lightning. Yet we are told by the Lord that we see our prayers answered through persistence. It is funny. I don’t think the Lord meant to encourage the idea that God grants our prayers so that we’ll go away and leave Him alone. I chuckle at that idea. No, you are to persist so that you see the prayer answered. We are a dense lot. Sometimes we’ll pray for something, God will grant it, and we’ll keep on praying for it as if it hasn’t been answered only to realize later that God did answer that prayer, just not in the way we were looking for. If the widow had asked once and then after a period of a long time went by and the judge managed to include her request with some larger movement of laws and events she might not even know her request was ever granted. It is only by continuing until WE have an answer that we reach the real purpose of prayer. What is that purpose? To teach us the ways of God through our persistent prayer and watching. Not only does this end in praise, which is just more prayer, but it also teaches us through long experience the ways of God through observation. We wait upon Him, meaning we look to serve Him. We watch Him, meaning we persistently pray, and in so doing we learn what it is to have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Take some time today to grab your SPCC Prayer Book and make that Intercessory Prayer List for the week. Compare it to last week’s list to see if you need to adjust your previous requests after a week of watching, or, so you can give praise for the answer. Intercessory Prayer Lists help us focus our fire and increase our faith. Also, start memorizing Psalm 1:5 building on our memorization so far of Psalm 1:1-4. Completing Psalm 1 is just over the horizon. Press on! Remember our inaugural House-to-House Wednesday is coming up on Wednesday, February 5th, 2025. Put it on your calendar! Let’s walk together and increase our Christian fellowship in 2025!
May the Lord richly bless you, go in peace to love and serve Him.
Like, Share, Subscribe!
Discover more from Solomon's Porch Christian Community
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.