Prayer - Part 7: Travail
June 02, 2024      |     By: Jonathan Brickley      |      Category: Sermons      |      Location: El Dorado
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Jonathan continues to teach on prayer by looking at several stories to find “lessons in endurance”. From the persistent widow (Luke 18) to Abraham (Genesis 18) to Hannah (1 Samuel 1) to Elijah (1 Kings 18) to the Canaanite mom (Matthew 15) - we see the same thread: DON’T GIVE UP! Endurance is needed because prayer can be difficult. There can be no spiritual reproduction (discipleship) without the pain of travail as in childbirth!

Recap last week

Lessons in persistence/Travail
- Luke 18: persistent widow
- Genesis 18: Abraham
- 1 kings 18: Elijah
- 1 Samuel 1: Hannah
- Matthew 15: Canaanite mom

Isaiah 66:8 (NIV)
8 Who has ever heard of such things? Who has ever seen things like this? Can a country be born in a day or a nation be brought forth in a moment? Yet no sooner is Zion in labor than she gives birth to her children.

There can be no spiritual children / reproduction / discipleship until we learn to travail

Galatians 4:19 (NIV)
19 My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you,

Psalms 56:3-4 (NIV)
3 When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.
4     In God, whose word I praise—in God I trust and am not afraid.
   What can mere mortals do to me?

Streams in the Desert Greatest Gifts Come Through Travail In hope he believed against hope...He did not weaken in faith - Romans 4:18-19 (ESV) 

Romans 4:18-19 (ESV)
18 In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.”
19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb.

We shall never forget a remark that George Mueller once made to a gentleman who had asked him the best way to have strong faith. “The only way,” replied the patriarch of faith, “to learn strong faith is to endure great trials. I have learned my faith by standing firm amid severe testings.” This is very true. The time to trust is when all else fails.

Dear one, you scarcely realize the value of your present opportunity; if you are passing through great afflictions you are in the very soul of the strongest faith, and if you will only let go, He will teach you in these hours the mightiest hold upon His throne which you can ever know. “Be not afraid, only believe.” And if you are afraid, just look up and say, “What time I am afraid I will trust in thee,” and you will yet thank God for the school of sorrow which was to you the school of faith.
—A. B. Simpson

“Great faith must have great trials.” “God’s greatest gifts come through travail. Whether we look into the spiritual or temporal sphere, can we discover anything, any great reform, any beneficent discovery, any soul-awakening revival, which did not come through the toils and tears, the vigils and blood-shedding of men and women whose sufferings were the pangs of its birth? If the temple of God is raised, David must bear sore afflictions; if the Gospel of the grace of God is to be disentangled from Jewish tradition, Paul’s life must be one long agony.”

“Take heart, O weary, burdened one,
bowed down Beneath thy cross;
Remember that thy greatest gain
may come Through greatest loss.”