Day Seven: When Christ returns will he find any faithful?
Scripture: Luke 18:1, ESV
Principle: The preservation of faith requires prayer.
Many people have professed faith and started their faith journey with excitement and high hopes only to crash and burn. Maybe it’s happened to you. Your faith today isn’t what it used to be. There was a day when you were in church every week, served in children’s ministry and shared your faith. But now you don’t do any of those things. Your faith requires maintenance just like your car. You can drive a car without changing the oil or putting air in the tires but it’s only a matter of time before it stops working. Prayer is the maintenance of your faith.
Charles Spurgeon says,
“If you are a child of God, the same alternative lies before you. You will either pray or faint:”16
It is impossible to persevere in faith without prayer. In Luke 17 the Pharisees ask Jesus about the coming of the Kingdom. Jesus uses this opportunity to tell his disciples about his immediate future of rejection and death and also the distant future when he returns to judge the earth. It is when he finishes this teaching that he tells the parable about the persistent widow. Luke placed this parable at this point of his gospel to encourage us to pray and not lose heart. I strongly believe the church of his day was expecting Christ to return in their lifetime but while they waited, it wasn’t easy. There was tremendous persecution of Christians. It would not have been easy to live in fear of being arrested and tortured or seeing someone you love martyred because of their faith. These are things which will make you question your faith. Only through prayer can you persist.
While we may not face the same persecution today, there are still many circumstances which can cause us to lose heart. Prayer is your only defense.
Application: Pray today that God would strengthen your faith and the faith of your church family with this prayer,
“Strengthen my faith, Lord, and encourage my hope! Inspire me to opposing everything that blocks my way to heaven. And let me set my face against all the assaults of earth and hell.”17
16 C. H. Spurgeon, “When Should We Pray?,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 43 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1897), 260.
17 Philip Doddridge, “I Need Your Protection,” in Piercing Heaven: Prayers of the Puritans, ed. Robert Elmer (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), 84.