How to Pray and Not Give Up: Lessons on Prayer from Jesus (Luke 18:1)

To pray and not give up is to keep coming to God, consistently and persistently, until your heart has peace and you know what He wants you to do. Jesus told a parable “to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint” (Luke 18:1, KJV). To faint is to lose courage and concede defeat. Without prayer, giving up is almost inevitable; with it, believers draw strength from God for every season.

Prayer is where your connection to God grows

Your connection to Jesus, your source, is cultivated in prayer. God has given us great promises in His Word, and prayer is how those promises are brought into our lives. There is no substitute for it, and laziness in prayer is not an option for a believer who wants to stand in perilous times.

Learn from the prayer life of Jesus

“Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed.”

Mark 1:35 (NKJV)

Despite a demanding schedule, Jesus never neglected prayer. When the disciples found Him they said, “Everyone is looking for You” (Mark 1:37). When your prayer life is what it should be, people will seek you out, because you carry answers.

• Before choosing His apostles, He “continued all night in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12).
• After feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fish, He went up the mountain to pray and was there until the fourth watch of the night, between 3 and 6 a.m. (Matthew 14:23–25).
• Facing the cross, He prayed in Gethsemane for about three hours, asking His disciples, “Could you not watch with Me one hour?” (Matthew 26:40).

In challenging times, choose to pray instead of complaining, murmuring or staying up idle. Some people face serious trouble yet have not prayed for thirty minutes in a day, while their complaints only magnify the problem.

Prayer is a search for direction: David at Ziklag

In 1 Samuel 30, David and his men returned to Ziklag to find it burned and their families taken captive. They wept until they had no more strength, and the men even spoke of stoning David. At that critical point, “David strengthened himself in the Lord his God” (1 Samuel 30:6) and called for Abiathar the priest to inquire of the Lord.

“So David inquired of the Lord, saying, “Shall I pursue this troop? Shall I overtake them?” And He answered him, “Pursue, for you shall surely overtake them and without fail recover all.””

1 Samuel 30:8 (NKJV)

David pursued with confidence and recovered everything, with extra spoils besides. Prayer is not just a plea for God to deal with our enemies; it is a quest for divine direction. When adversity strikes, approach your Father and ask, “Lord, what should I do?” If you have cultivated your relationship with Him in prayer, you will recognise His voice when He answers. That is how “all things work together for good to those who love God” (Romans 8:28) becomes your experience.

Praying in the Spirit

“Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”

Romans 8:26–27 (NKJV)

We often know that we should pray, but not exactly what to pray for. You might feel led to pray for your pastor and immediately ask for more grace and anointing, good things, when what is needed at that moment is direction or provision. The Holy Spirit knows. That is why Scripture urges us to pray “always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:18, KJV) and to build ourselves up “praying in the Holy Spirit” (Jude 20).

When you pray in the Spirit and continue until you sense a breakthrough in your heart, God will often bring understanding, and sometimes the interpretation of what you have been praying. Many miss this depth because they do not persist. Don’t rush your prayers when seeking God’s guidance.

“Call to Me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things, fenced in and hidden, which you do not know (do not distinguish and recognize, have knowledge of and understand).”

Jeremiah 33:3 (AMPC)

What to pray about

In the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2–4), Jesus gave a pattern. Include:

• Worship and adoration of God.
• The coming and establishment of His kingdom wherever you are and over all the earth.
• Your personal needs, including daily direction.
• Your local church and the Body of Christ worldwide.
• Your nation and its leaders.
• Intercession for others, as the Holy Spirit lays them on your heart.

We are “God’s fellow workers” (1 Corinthians 3:9). When you make yourself available as God’s partner in prayer, your concerns become His concern too.

Build your prayer life like training for a race

“For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come.”

1 Timothy 4:8 (NKJV)

Running a hundred metres is easy for someone who jogs every day and exhausting for someone who never trains. Prayer is the same. The only way to master prayer is to pray, consistently. Be mindful of time: Jesus returned to His disciples after an hour, which shows He was aware of it.

1. Set a fixed daily time and place, ideally early in the day.
2. Start with worship and thanksgiving, then pray through Scripture promises.
3. Spend a portion of every session praying in the Spirit.
4. Pause to listen and write down what God impresses on your heart.
5. Increase your time gradually, and set aside longer seasons of prayer when facing big decisions.
6. Join corporate prayer meetings: there is strength in praying together.