Are You Still Praying for Them?

Have you ever noticed what happens when someone you know goes through something hard? A loss, a diagnosis, a divorce. The first couple of weeks, everybody shows up. The texts come in, people are dropping off food, people are checking in, sending cards, asking how they're holding up. And then a few weeks pass and the meals stop coming, the texts get further apart. Not because anybody stopped caring. Life just kind of resumed. Everyone went back to their own stuff. And that person they're still in it. The hard thing didn't end when the food and the people stopped showing up. It just got quieter around them. You know, I've been sitting with that recently because I have a friend who went through a devastating loss of a loved one. And I've been trying so hard to stay present and to stay connected and in touch with her, to check in on her and to not leave her in a place of silence where everyone fades away when she needs us the most. And the more I was thinking about this, I felt that God kind of placed on my spirit that we sometimes do the exact same thing with our prayers. There's somebody that you used to pray for hard. And somewhere along the way, the prayer thinned out, same as the meal train that stopped when people stopped showing up for the person who was going through something hard. Not because you decided to stop caring about them. That's not it. You just stopped showing up for them in prayer, but they're still in it. Hey, I'm Melissa, and this is my question for you. We are four weeks into our series that I've been calling the Prayers I Stopped Praying. And if you're just finding us, here's a quick recap of where we've been. We started this series by just noticing the prayers that went quiet, the ones that faded without a question. Then we got into the prayers we stopped praying because the answer didn't come. And we talked about how God's silence is not the same as God's absence. And last week we kind of turned a corner. The prayers we stopped because God did answer, and the answer asks more of us than we were ready to give. But every prayer we've talked about so far has one thing in common. They've all been about us, about our situation, our healing, and our calling. And today, we're turning to a different kind of stop prayer, the kind that you weren't praying for yourself at all. You were praying for someone else. So let me ease into this because this one deserves a gentle start. Here's what I've noticed. Almost all of us have at least one. One person we've been praying for quietly, faithfully for a long time, not just for a season, maybe months, maybe even years. Someone whose name we used to bring to God so often it almost felt like we were doing it from a reflex. And we don't talk about those prayers much because they're so tender. They're tied to people we love, people we've worried over, people we've maybe lost a little sleep about. But I think this kind of prayer, the kind of prayer for someone else, is its own kind of tired. And I want us to sit with why. Because there's a specific kind of prayer that weighs you down in a way that others don't. It's the prayer you pray for a person who doesn't change. Maybe it's a child who's walked away from everything you raised them to believe. Could be a sibling or a parent who went quiet years ago that never came back. Or maybe it's a friend who keeps making the same choice. You're watching them do the same thing the same way, and it feels like you've watched them do it a hundred times. Or maybe someone who's hurt you and you were praying for them. You really were praying hard for them, and at some point, praying for them started to feel like it cost you more than you had. And here's the thing about praying for another person: you can't make them move. That's the hard part. When you pray for yourself, at least you're in the room for the answer. You can do something, you can take a step. But when you pray for someone else, you're asking God to do something inside a heart you can't reach. And you can do that for a long time, years even. But there's a kind of erosion that happens when you keep lifting somebody up and nothing on the outside ever looks different. It just seems like nothing is ever changing. And it's not dramatic. You don't get angry at God or ask why things aren't moving. You just kind of get tired. The prayer for them gets shorter, and then eventually it seems to get a little vague. You find yourself just getting real quick with it and saying things like, God, be with them. And then one day you realize you haven't really prayed for that person in a long, long time. You didn't decide to stop. You just got tired, and the prayer went quiet. But I want us to be honest about what's actually underneath that, because I don't think it's only exhaustion. I think for a lot of us, the prayer for that person didn't just get tired, it got hopeless. Somewhere in there, and we'd never say this out loud, but somewhere in there, we made a quiet decision about that person. We decided they're not going to change. We looked at all the patterns over all the years, the same choices, and somewhere in our heart, we filed them into a category of never going to change. And once you've decided somebody's a lost cause, you stop praying for them the same way you stop waiting for someone you've given up on. And we tell ourselves we're just being realistic. We call it just accepting it, protecting our peace. And sometimes, sometimes, that really is wisdom. Sometimes that's right. And we'll talk about that in just a second. But a lot of the time, if I'm being honest, it's not acceptance. It's unbelief about wearing acceptance's clothes. So here's my question for you this week. The surface question seems simple. Are you still praying for them? But underneath it is the one I actually want you to sit with. Did you stop praying for them or did you stop believing they change? Because those are two very different things. One is about being tired, the other is about giving up. And only you know which one is true about the person who just came to mind when I asked. So I want to take you to a man in scripture who had every reason to quit on the people he was praying for, and he flat out refused to do it. His name is Samuel. Some of you may know him, some of you may not, and that's fine. But here's what you need to know. Samuel was the last of Israel's judges. For his whole life, he led these people. He prayed for them, he carried them. He was the one God spoke through to guide the whole nation. And then the people did something that had to just absolutely break his heart. They came to him and said, basically, we don't want this anymore. We don't want a prophet leading us. We want a king like all the other nations have. Think about that for a second. These are the people he poured his whole life into, and they came to him and told him to his face that they wanted a different kind of leadership. They were rejecting him. And God even says it to Samuel Samuel directly. They haven't rejected you, they've rejected me. But you and I both know that didn't make it hurt any less. It didn't stop Samuel's pain. That's the people he'd been praying for his entire life, telling him they were done with the way he'd led them. So if anybody had earned the right to say, you know what, pray for yourselves, it was Samuel. If anyone had a reason to let that prayer go quiet, to step back and to protect his own heart and let them figure it out, it was him. And here's what he says instead. This is 1 Samuel chapter 12, verse 23. The people have just realized that they messed up and they're scared. And Samuel, the man they rejected, says this As for me, far be it for me that I should sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you. I need us to slow all the way down on that because there's something in how he says it that I think changes everything. Look at who he says he'd be sinning against. Not them, not the people, but God. Samuel doesn't say I'd be letting the people down if I stopped praying for them. He says he'd be sinning against the Lord. And that one word changes the whole thing because it tells you who Samuel thought the prayer was really for. We think of praying for someone as something we do for that person. And in a sense, it is. But Samuel understood something deeper. The prayer wasn't first about the people, it was about God. It was about obedience. It was Samuel staying faithful to who God had called him to be, someone who lifted these people up regardless of how they treated him, regardless of whether they ever turned around or whether it ever worked out. And do you see what that does? It completely takes the people's response out of the equation. Because if I'm praying for someone so that they'll change, then the day I decide they won't, the prayer dies. It has to. I prayed for an outcome and I gave up on the outcome, so why would I keep praying? But if I'm praying for them as an act of obedience to God, as a way of staying faithful, of loving them the way I've been told to love people, then whether or not they ever change was never the point. Their response was never what held the prayer up. My obedience to God was. And that's the thing I think a lot of us quietly got backwards. We turned intercession into a transaction. I'll pray, and in exchange, I expect to see movement. And when the movement didn't come, we felt like the deal fell through, so we walked away from the prayer. But it was never a deal. It was obedience. And obedience doesn't expire just because the other person didn't hold up therein, because the other person was never holding it up in the first place. God was. And if you want to know where Samuel got that, where any of us get it, Jesus said it as plainly as it can be said. Somebody once asked Jesus what the single greatest commandment was out of everything, and he gave them two tied together. He said, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. That's Matthew chapter 22. And then he says that all the law hangs on these two things. Everything. The whole thing comes down to loving God and loving people. Now here's what I want you to see. Praying for someone you can't reach any other way, someone who's walked away, who won't listen, someone whose heart is somewhere you simply can't find it in yourself to go. That might be one of the purest forms of loving your neighbor there is. Think about it. You can't fix them. You can't argue them into changing or follow them into the rooms where they make their choices. There's almost nothing left you can do for that person except this. You can still bring them to God. You can still stand in the gap for a heart you can't touch. And when you do that, even tired after all these years after praying and praying and praying with no evidence it's doing anything, you are obeying the second greatest commandment that there is. You are loving your neighbor in the one way that's still open to you. And that's not a small thing you do until it stops working. That's obedience, that's love, that's the whole law hanging right there in a prayer. Nobody sees you pray. And I'll add one honest thing here, because I know somebody needs it. Loving someone in prayer does not always mean letting them back into your life. For some of us, the wisest, healthiest thing you ever did was put a boundary between you and that person. And hear me when I say that. Keep the boundary. Praying for someone from behind a wall you needed to build is still loving them. Sometimes the prayer is the only safe place left to love them from. And that still counts. That's still obedience. So let me say the thing this whole episode has been walking toward. You're not praying for them to change. You're praying because you refuse to stop loving them the way God never stopped loving you. That's the reframe. That's the whole turn. The prayer that you let go quiet, you set it down because you decided they'd never be different. But that was never the reason to pray in the first place. You weren't praying to produce a result. You were praying to obey a God who told you to love people. And who, by the way, has never once given up on a single one of us, no matter how long our own patterns seem to drag on. Think about how patient God has been with you. The same thing you'd given up on in that other person, the slowness, the same mistake that you saw happening over and over again, the years that it's taking for something to change. God's been carrying that in you the whole time. And he never once decided you were a lost cause. He never stopped. He never went quiet on you. And he's asking you to love your neighbor as yourself, which means with that same refusing to quit kind of love, you've been on the receiving end of your entire life. So let me bring this back to the beginning. There's a person who came to mind for you somewhere in the last 20 minutes, and you know exactly who they are. They came up the second that I asked. And maybe you stopped praying for them because you got tired or because they hurt you. Or because, if you're honest, you looked at the whole long story and you just quietly decided it was never going to change. What was the point? I'm not here to load you up with guilt about that. It's never what we try to do here. Your tiredness is real. The hurt is real. And deciding somebody won't change is one of the most understandable conclusions a human heart can come to. But I want you to hear that the prayer was never writing on whether they'd change. It was never a strategy. It was obedience and it was love. It was you doing the one thing still left to do for a person that you can't reach, handing them to the God who can. So maybe this week, pick that prayer back up. Not because you've got fresh evidence that finally, that they're finally turning around, but because loving them in prayer was always the right thing to do, and it still is. It was never about the result. It was always about obedience to a God who's still, right now, refusing to give up on that person. And God is refusing to give up on you. Okay, so if you have your journal nearby, or honestly, even just a quiet minute in the car, wherever you're listening, listening to this, I've got a few things that I want you to sit with this week. The first one's the simplest. I want you to just think about who came to mind. When I asked, are you still praying for them? Someone serviced. So the first thing is just this. I want you to think about that person. Think about their name. You don't have to do anything with it just yet. Just put a name to the face. Say it to God. Lord, it's them. It's been them the whole time. And I want you to just remember that person in that prayer that maybe you let go. And once you've named them, here's the harder one. When you stop praying for that person, why? What was it that you got tired of or you got hurt from somewhere along the way that you just decide quietly they were never going to change? There's no wrong answer, but you know which one it was. So let yourself say it. Let yourself feel why you stopped praying for that person in the first place. And then the last one, and this is the one I think God's really after. If the prayer was never about getting them to change, if it was always about obedience, about loving them the way you've been loved, does the reason you stopped still hold up? Be honest, does it? Now listen, you don't have to fix anything today. You don't have to make a single promise about how faithfully you'll pray from here on out. I want you to just name the person, get honest about why the prayer went quiet, and then if you're willing, pray for them just one more time today, not for a result, but just out of love and just out of obedience. The person you gave up on praying for, God hasn't given up on them. He's been just as patient with them as he's been with you. And he's been so patient with you. He never decided you were too far gone. He never looked at how long your own change was taking and went quiet on you. He just kept loving on you, pursuing you, showing up. And then he turned around and asked you to love your neighbor the exact same way. So this week, pick the prayer back up. Not to change them, just to love them the way you've been loved by God the whole time. Next week, we're gonna turn the question all the way around. Because we've prayed about our circumstances, we've prayed for other people, but there's one person a lot of us quietly stopped praying for somewhere along the way. Ourselves. And we're gonna talk about why. So I really hope you'll come back for that one. Until next week, I want you to keep asking, keep listening, and remember, you're not praying for that person to change. You're praying because you refuse to stop loving them the way God never stopped loving you. I'd love to keep the conversation going. Each week, I send a short email called This Week's Question, a Quiet Invitation, and it's a simple reflection to help you stay grounded, to pay attention, to dive deeper into God's Word, and to walk with God throughout your week. You can sign up at myquestion for you dot com, bringing you encouragement for your spirit and wisdom for your walk.