One of my supporters is quite old now. She has been a prayer partner with my mom for years. She was there in Long Beach with Dawson Trotman at the founding of the Navigators after WWII. When I asked her what one truth about prayer she’d like to pass on to me, she said, “The secret of praying through an issue.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“That means praying about an issue until God gives you peace in your spirit that it is accomplished.”

Turns out, this is a discipline that former generations understood better than we do.

Missionary to China, J. O. Fraser practiced this powerful reality. He said this:

"We must be prepared for serious warfare, 'and having done all, to stand,' we must fight through, and then stand victorious on the battlefield. Is not this another secret of many unanswered prayers, that they are not fought through?

If the result is not seen as soon as expected, Christians are apt to lose heart, and if it is still longer delayed, to abandon it altogether. You know the name they give to places in England when the building (or whatever it is) is abandoned, when only half of it is completed- So and so's 'Folly'. I wonder whether some of our prayers do not deserve the same stigma.

Luke 14: 28-30 applies to prayers as well as towers. We must count the cost before praying the prayer of faith. We must be willing to pay the price. We must mean business. We must set ourselves to 'see things through' (Eph. 6:18, 'In all perseverance')."

We must particularly learn to pray through issues of spiritual warfare. David Smithers writes, “Wrestling with demonic spirits is a daily reality of spiritual survival. Spiritual warfare is not learned in our leisure time, but is thrust upon us as we begin to threaten the kingdom of darkness.”