Rita sold lace and ankara at Balogun market for fourteen years, and for most of those years she did well. She had two shops, three girls working for her, and customers who came from Cotonou and Accra. Then, in the space of eight months, everything went wrong at once. A container of fabric was held at the port for weeks. The naira fell, and then fell again. Customers who used to buy by the bale began to buy by the yard. She let two of the girls go. Then she closed the second shop.
That was when the praying began in earnest. Rita had always gone to church, but now she went everywhere. She attended a vigil on Friday, a deliverance service on Tuesday and a dawn prayer meeting on the other side of Lagos that meant leaving the house at four. A woman at the market told her about a prayer house in Ikorodu where the leader was known for results. Rita went, and was told that her case needed a seven-day special intercession, with a seed to match the size of the need. She borrowed two hundred and fifty thousand naira from her cooperative society to pay it.
At home, she prayed at three in the morning, on her knees on the cold tiles of the parlour. Her prayers were mostly one word, repeated until her voice went hoarse. Please. Please. Please, God. She promised Him things. She would give more. She would serve more. She would never miss another service. She reminded Him of every good thing she had ever done, and wept until she could not breathe.
One night her youngest daughter, who was ten, came out of the bedroom in her nightdress and stood in the doorway watching her. Rita wiped her face and told her to go back to bed. The girl did not move. “Mummy,” she said, “is God angry with us?”
Rita had no answer. She sat back on her heels on the tiles, and for the first time in months she heard what her prayers sounded like from the outside. They sounded like a woman pleading with someone who did not want to help her.
This article is for anyone who has prayed like that. I want to say at once that I am not going to scold you. Desperation is not a sin, and some of the most beautiful prayers in the Bible were cried out by desperate people. But there is a difference between bringing your urgent need to a Father you trust and trying to wring help out of a God you suspect is reluctant. That difference changes everything about how you pray, and about what your children learn from listening.
Urgency is welcome
Let us begin with a man who was very loud.
Blind Bartimaeus sat by the road outside Jericho, begging. When he heard that Jesus of Nazareth was passing, he began to shout: “Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me” (Mark 10:47). The crowd told him to be quiet. He shouted all the more. It was not dignified. It was not calm. It was the cry of a vulnerable man who knew this might be his only chance.
And Scripture says, “And Jesus stood still” (Mark 10:49). The Lord of glory, on His way to Jerusalem and the cross, stopped in the road for a blind beggar. He called him, asked him, “What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?” (Mark 10:51), and healed him. Jesus told him his faith had made him whole.
That account should keep us from judging prayer by how composed it sounds. We must never teach prayer in a way that allows only polished, quiet speech. Bartimaeus’s loud cry was faith. It was directed at the right Person, and it came from a man who believed that Jesus could and would show mercy. The Lord receives people who come with genuine need, however they sound.
So the difference this article is about lies deeper than volume, tears or urgency. It lies in what we believe about God while we ask. Trust brings urgent need to God because His mercy has already been revealed. Begging, in the unhealthy sense, assumes that His compassion must be purchased with misery, or that the Father only becomes caring once we have made ourselves sufficiently desperate.
We must never use that distinction to shame a suffering person’s language. “Please,” “help me” and “have mercy” are fitting words in a great many prayers. The question is whether the heart is turning toward the Father’s goodness or trying to produce goodness in Him through emotional pressure.
Two desperate people in Mark 5
Mark gives us a remarkable chapter in which two desperate people come to Jesus within the same hour. The first is Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, a man of standing in his town. He fell at Jesus’ feet “And besought him greatly, saying, My little daughter lieth at the point of death” (Mark 5:23). He begged, in the plainest sense of the word. And Jesus went with him immediately.
On the way, the crowd pressed around them, and a second person approached from behind:
And a certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve years, And had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse, When she had heard of Jesus, came in the press behind, and touched his garment. For she said, If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole. And straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague. And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes? And his disciples said unto him, Thou seest the multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me? And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing. But the woman fearing and trembling, knowing what was done in her, came and fell down before him, and told him all the truth. And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague.
Look at what she had been through. Twelve years of bleeding. Under the law, that condition made her ceremonially unclean, which meant twelve years of exclusion from worship and from ordinary touch. She “had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse.” Every naira was gone. Every option had failed. She was at the end.
Notice how she approached. She came from behind, in secret. “If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole.” There was real faith in that sentence, and Jesus honoured it. But there was also fear. She did not expect to be welcomed. She hoped to receive healing without being seen, as though she had to steal a blessing from someone who might not give it if asked.
Jesus would not let her leave like that. He stopped and asked who had touched Him. The disciples thought it was a ridiculous question with the crowd pressing on every side. But Jesus kept looking until she came forward, “fearing and trembling,” and fell down before Him and told Him all the truth.
And He called her Daughter.
As far as the Gospels record, this is the only time Jesus addressed an individual woman by that word. A woman who had been untouchable for twelve years, who had spent everything and crept up behind Him hoping to go unnoticed, was publicly named as family. “Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.” Her body was healed when she touched His garment. Her fear was healed when she heard His voice. Jesus wanted her to know that she had not stolen anything. She had been received.
Meanwhile, Jairus had been waiting. Every minute Jesus spent with the woman was a minute his daughter was dying. And then the news came:
While he yet spake, there came from the ruler of the synagogue’s house certain which said, Thy daughter is dead: why troublest thou the Master any further? As soon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, he saith unto the ruler of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only believe.
“Be not afraid, only believe.” That was Jesus’ word to a desperate father at the very moment his worst fear came true. He did not rebuke Jairus for begging earlier. He did not tell him he had prayed wrongly. He simply turned him from fear to trust. And then He went to the house, took the girl by the hand and raised her from the dead.
Notice one more detail. The woman had been sick for twelve years. The girl, Mark tells us, was twelve years old (Mark 5:42). The woman’s suffering had lasted the whole of the child’s life. Both stories end with Jesus restoring a daughter. Both desperate people learned that they were dealing with someone who wanted to help them.
PunchlineJesus would not let the woman leave thinking she had stolen a blessing. He called her Daughter. Trust begins when you realise you have been received, not tolerated.
Not heard for much speaking
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus speaks directly to the kind of prayer that tries to wear God down:
But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do : for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.
“Use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.” The word Jesus uses suggests babbling, piling up words for their own sake. The pagan world around Israel had many gods, and none of them could be relied on. They were thought to be distracted, moody or indifferent, and worshippers believed they had to get their attention through the sheer volume and length of their prayers, or through long lists of divine names, in case they missed the right one.
The most vivid picture of this in Scripture is on Mount Carmel. The prophets of Baal cried “O Baal, hear us” (1 Kings 18:26) from morning until noon. Elijah mocked them: perhaps their god was asleep, or on a journey. So they shouted louder, “And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them” (1 Kings 18:28). They kept it up until evening, “that there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded” (1 Kings 18:29).
That is what begging looks like when it is aimed at a god who is not there. Volume. Self-harm. Exhaustion. The assumption that suffering and noise will finally force a response.
Then Elijah prayed. His prayer takes about thirty seconds to read aloud. “Hear me, O LORD, hear me, that this people may know that thou art the LORD God” (1 Kings 18:37). And the fire fell.
Elijah had staked his life on the answer, so his short prayer cannot have come from caring less. It was short because he knew who he was talking to.
Jesus’ reason for forbidding vain repetition is beautiful: “Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.” The whole difference rests on that one word. Father. The pagans did not have one. You do. He already knows. He is not waiting to be informed, or worn down, or persuaded that you are suffering enough to deserve attention.
Does that mean we should not ask? Of course not. Jesus goes straight on to teach the Lord’s Prayer, which is full of requests. Later in the same chapter He says, “for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things” (Matthew 6:32), and then tells us to seek the kingdom first and trust Him for the rest. We ask because He is our Father. We do not ask in order to make Him become one.
Nor does Jesus forbid all repetition. In Gethsemane He prayed three times, “saying the same words” (Matthew 26:44). The psalms repeat refrains. What He forbids is vain repetition: words multiplied because we think the multiplying is what moves God.
A judge who is nothing like your Father
Someone will say, “But Jesus told us to keep asking.” He did. And His parable about persistence is worth reading carefully, because it is often understood the wrong way round:
And he spake a parable unto them to this end , that men ought always to pray, and not to faint; Saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man: And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man; Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?
Luke tells us the purpose before the story begins: “that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.” Jesus wants His disciples to keep praying without losing heart. Then He tells of a widow and a corrupt judge who “feared not God, neither regarded man.” The widow had no money for bribes and no powerful relatives. All she had was persistence, and in the end the judge gave her justice simply to get rid of her.
Now, the point of the parable is not that God is like the judge. That is exactly what Jesus says He is not. The argument runs from the lesser to the greater. “Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God avenge his own elect?” If even a wicked, indifferent judge will eventually respond to a widow who keeps coming, how much more will your righteous Father, who loves you, respond to His own children who cry to Him day and night?
The widow had to wear the judge down. You do not have to wear God down. You keep coming because you trust Him. Your persistence is the persistence of a child who knows the Father is good and keeps bringing the matter until it is settled. It is a completely different thing from the anxious pleading of someone trying to overcome divine reluctance.
That frees a long-standing concern to stay in prayer without becoming an embarrassment. You may return to it for months or years. Repeated asking does not mean that your first prayer failed to meet some procedural requirement. It means you are still trusting.
And notice the question with which Jesus ends the parable: “Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” The Father’s willingness to hear was never in doubt. The open question is whether we will keep trusting Him while we wait.
Jesus makes the same argument elsewhere, comparing God with earthly fathers who give their children bread and fish. “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” (Luke 11:13). How much more. That is the logic of trust.
When fear writes the vow
NuggetOne of the clearest signs that prayer has slipped from trust into anxious bargaining is the vow made in panic.
A frightened person may promise a level of service or a financial gift he cannot responsibly sustain, because somewhere underneath he believes that God’s care depends on the size of the offer. “Lord, if You do this for me, I will give You my car.” “If You heal my mother, I will go to the mission field.” Such promises often leave the person with a second burden instead of a clearer trust. When the answer comes, he is bound to something he never thought through. When it does not come, he wonders whether he offered enough.
Scripture takes vows seriously, which is exactly why it warns us against rushing into them. “When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it” (Ecclesiastes 5:4), the Preacher says, and then adds, “Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay” (Ecclesiastes 5:5). Just before that he counsels, “let thy words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:2). God is not impressed by promises made under pressure.
Gratitude may well lead to generous commitment. Hannah made a vow and kept it, and her gift of Samuel was beautiful. But panic should not be allowed to write the commitment. Seek a clear mind. Honour the real responsibilities you already have to your family and your creditors. And remember that the Father’s love is not for sale. If you have already made a vow in fear that you are now struggling with, take it to a mature pastor and talk it through honestly. There is wisdom and grace for that conversation.
The same truth applies when someone offers to make your prayer more effective through a special payment or exclusive access. Mature believers can pray with you and care for you, and there is a proper place for giving to the work of God. But faithful ministry directs your confidence toward Jesus. It never implies that His priesthood is insufficient without a private arrangement that you must pay for.
The writer to the Hebrews tells you how to approach: “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). You come for mercy because of who your High Priest is, not because you have assembled a sufficient argument or a sufficient seed. No minister can provide a better doorway to that throne than the Son of God has already opened. Receive faithful help from people, by all means. Just do not surrender the access the gospel has given you in Him.
A weaned child
What, then, does trust look like? One of the shortest psalms in the Bible gives us a picture:
LORD , my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. Let Israel hope in the LORD from henceforth and for ever.
This is a psalm of David, a king, a warrior and a man who carried enormous responsibilities. And he describes his soul as a weaned child.
Think about the difference between a nursing infant and a weaned child in a mother’s arms. The nursing baby, when hungry, roots and frets and cries. The mother’s lap means one thing: food. The baby cannot rest there until it gets what it wants. But a weaned child, perhaps two or three years old, can climb into its mother’s lap simply to be with her. It is no longer demanding milk. It trusts that it will be fed when it is time to eat. Its mother’s presence has become enough.
“Surely I have behaved and quieted myself.” The word behaved there means something like calmed or composed. David did it deliberately. The quiet did not simply happen to him. He had to settle his own soul, like a mother soothing a fretful child, until it rested in God.
He also says, “neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.” Part of trust is accepting that we do not have to understand everything. We do not need a full explanation of the delay before we can rest. Some things are too high for us, and we leave them with the One for whom nothing is too high.
Then the psalm turns outward: “Let Israel hope in the LORD from henceforth and for ever.” A settled soul becomes an encouragement to others. A mother who has learned this rest teaches her children something very different from a mother who prays as though God is angry.
Isaiah said something similar to a frightened nation: “in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). Peter put it simply: “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you” (1 Peter 5:7). You do not cast your care on someone you think does not care. You cast it on Him because He does.
This kind of quiet still acts. The weaned child still eats, and David still fought battles. You will still pray, ask, knock and seek. But you will do it from your Father’s lap.
Lament is still trust
Before we close, we must make room for something important. Trust does not always sound calm. Sometimes trust sounds like this:
How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD ? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me? Consider and hear me, O LORD my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death; Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved. But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing unto the LORD , because he hath dealt bountifully with me.
“How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever?” Four times in two verses the psalmist asks how long. He feels forgotten. He feels that God has hidden His face. He is not pretending.
And yet the psalm ends, “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.” The movement is not emotionally tidy. Nothing in the psalm says the circumstance changed between verse 2 and verse 5. What changed was where he directed his heart. This is a faithful conversation with God, and it has been placed in the Bible so that God’s people would have words for seasons when they feel abandoned.
That means lament is not the same as the anxious begging we have been describing. Lament tells God the truth about how it feels, and then turns toward His mercy. Anxious begging tries to change God’s mind about us. One is a child crying in a father’s arms. The other is a stranger hammering on a door.
Paul adds a further comfort. When prayer itself feels weak, “the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:26). Some nights you will not know what to say. Some nights you will only manage a groan. The Spirit of God takes even that and carries it before the Father according to His will. You are not abandoned because you cannot find the right words.
We need room for this in the church. A grieving person may not have a polished confession ready. A parent waiting for news from the hospital may speak in short, repeated sentences. If you are walking with someone like that, your first responsibility may be to stay present, help with practical needs and pray gently with them. Correcting every expression of distress can make people less honest without making them stronger. Give the truth patiently, with attention to what they can receive. You do not have to supply a reason for every delay in order to be a faithful companion. Let the Father’s care become recognisable in the way you speak of Him.
And if you are the one waiting, there is freedom in asking another believer to stand with you. A long need can make you feel that you have become tiresome to everyone. Choose trustworthy people and tell them honestly what support you need. The church was given a shared life so that burdens could be carried together.
Rita did not go back to the prayer house in Ikorodu. A few weeks after her daughter’s question, she sat down with her pastor and told him everything: the borrowed money, the vows, the three in the morning on the tiles. He did not mock her. He opened his Bible to Mark 5 and read about the woman who had spent all she had on physicians and grew worse. “That was you,” he said gently. “Now read what Jesus called her.”
The business did not recover overnight. Rita gave up the remaining shop at Balogun and moved to a smaller stall nearer home. She is still repaying the cooperative, a little each month. Some months are hard.
But she prays differently. She still prays early, and she still asks God plainly for customers, for favour at the port, for wisdom with her prices. Sometimes she still cries. The difference is that she no longer prays as if she is trying to get past a guard. She told me she learned Psalm 131 by heart, and that some mornings she just sits in the parlour with her cup of tea and says it slowly, until her soul is quiet.
A few months after that conversation, her daughter came out of the bedroom early one morning and found her mother sitting on the settee with her Bible open, praying in a low voice. The girl climbed up next to her and leaned against her shoulder. After a while she asked, “Mummy, what are you telling God?”
PunchlineRita put an arm around her. “I’m telling Him about the shop,” she said. “And I’m telling Him I trust Him.”
“Is He angry with us?”
“No,” Rita said. “He is our Father. He already knows what we need.”
The girl nodded and stayed there, quiet, leaning on her mother, a weaned child in her mother’s arms.
You may come to your Father loudly, like Bartimaeus. You may come trembling, like the woman in the crowd, or desperate, like Jairus. You may come asking how long. All of that is welcome. But you do not need to purchase His mercy with your misery. You have a Father who knows, a High Priest who has opened the way, and a Spirit who prays with you when you cannot. Bring your need. Then rest.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- When you pray about something urgent, what do you tend to believe about God’s willingness to help? Where did that belief come from?
- The woman in Mark 5 came secretly, as though she had to steal a blessing. Jesus called her “Daughter.” What does that say to you about the way He receives you?
- Have you ever made a promise or vow to God out of panic? What would wise, honest action look like now?
- What would it mean for your soul to be “as a weaned child” in your present situation?
- Who in your life is in a long season of waiting, and how could you stand with them without needing to explain everything?
This Week
This week, memorise Psalm 131. Each morning, before you bring your requests to God, read or recite it slowly, and take a few minutes to be quiet in His presence without asking for anything. Then make your requests plainly, in as few words as you need, and finish by saying aloud Jesus’ words from Matthew 6:8: “your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.” If you have made any vow or payment in fear, arrange this week to talk it over honestly with a mature pastor.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that I do not have to wear You down or purchase Your mercy with my misery. I confess that I have often prayed as though You were reluctant, and I have let fear write promises I could not keep. Thank You that Jesus stopped for Bartimaeus, called the trembling woman Daughter, and told Jairus not to be afraid. Teach me to come boldly to the throne of grace through my High Priest. Quiet my soul like a weaned child. I bring You my need, and I trust You with it, because You are my Father and You already know. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.