Our gospel this morning is one of Scripture’s greatest affirmations of persistence. 

Now, what Luke wants to emphasize is spiritual persistence, not persistence, in general, but that doesn’t stop people.

Many seem to read these words as God’s particular blessing for pretty much whatever it is we do, no matter what it is, as long as we are willing to stick with it and make it holy by our striving.

Luke is not quite saying that. 

His more particular point is that the spiritual life, a God-oriented, holiness-seeking sort of life, requires persistence. 

I’m going to come back to this in just a moment. 

But first, as I’ve been spending time with this passage over the last few days, I’ve made some curious discoveries about persistence in my own life. 

In fact, I’ll tell you what I did in case you’re moved to do it, too. 

I drew a rectangle with four quadrants on it—can you picture that?

So, along one side, I wrote “Persisted” by one column and “Gave Up” by the other. 

Along the top, I wrote “Glad” over one column and over the other, I wrote “Sorry.”

So I had a little grid, marking my persistence – specifically, when I was glad or sorry for persisting; and then the name for giving up, and when I was glad or sorry for doing that. 

Get it?

And I learned some things. 

First, the two quadrants I could fill instantly were the times I’m sorry I persisted, and its cheery cousin, the times I am actually glad I gave up.   

The things I’m sorry I persisted with turned out to be a list of all the women I dated in college.  This surprised me.   

But then I remembered and was completely sorry all over again. 

The things I’m glad I gave up were all jobs.  Not all my jobs, of course.  But still, jobs. 

I think what this means is that have learned my share of things the hard way. 

The things I’m glad I persisted with were things like really trying to learn French when I was in high school, which has turned out to be a source of joy during many different seasons of my life. 

Same thing with driving stick. 

The things I regret giving up were almost all hobbies. 

It’s unlikely, of course, that I would have gone pro with cribbage or opened a restaurant with my risotto.  

I never even pulled the trigger on beekeeping or learning Klingon.  

From where I am now, that’s probably just as well. 

But in writing these things out, I realized that I didn’t lose interest in them. 

It’s that I had let more “important” things crowd them out. 

They fell away because I have always let my life get out of balance much more easily than it should be, which is something I still grapple with.

So, I found some surprises, and I warmly recommend the exercise to you. 

It will also be obvious that the most immediate answers that came to me were not explicitly religious. 

Two of my most abiding commitments weren’t there—the ones I made by making formal covenants before God and neighbor, as I did when I got married and when I became a pastor. 

My hope is that those are such a part of who I am that it’s like saying I’m glad I persisted with breathing, or something. 

Of course, I never took some sort of oath to become a dad, but the same thing might be said. 

I’m never not one, even if my kids are somewhere else; and I’m never not one, even if I’m dead asleep in the wee hours of the morning after the midnight service on Christmas Eve.

Although this is the deepest sleep possible for a professional Christian, that role persists. 

It’s just part of who I am. 

And it’s with that in mind that I want to take a look at this morning’s Scripture—this affirmation of persistence. 

The overwhelming majority of the story’s hearers identify with the person knocking at midnight, whose knocking Jesus affirms so emphatically. 

He turns it into a firm promise of results with God: “Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for,” as one translation has it.  “Keep on seeking, and you will find.  Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds.  And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”[1]

“Persist,” he seems to say. “You’ll be glad you did.”

And yet, in a couple of weeks, we’ll hear the story of the foolish bridesmaids, who fall asleep waiting for the bridegroom to arrive and let their lamps run out of oil, then miss him when he arrives unexpectedly, and get explicitly shut out of the party despite all of their knocking. 

I’m mentioning it now just to name that persistence looks more than one way in Luke’s gospel, as it often does in our own lives. 

And so, in our story this morning, I suspect that Luke wants us to note both the persistence of the knocker and the different, but no less important persistence of the “knockee,” (for lack of a better term). 

Because what does it mean to be a Christian when you’re the one on the inside of a locked door?

It means being sound asleep at the end of a long day, with a lot on the docket for tomorrow, but resting for now…everything comfortable, everyone safe and sound.

And then there’s this knock. 

And this is where Luke is so thoughtful.

Because this isn’t the urgent knock of someone whose house is on fire. 

This isn’t someone who just saw creeps taking the catalytic converter out of his wife’s car. 

This isn’t a medical situation. 

As important as hospitality was in the ancient world, you would have to figure that a guest arriving at midnight would be prepared to wait for breakfast. 

Really, this is one of those umpteen small moments in life when the priorities are murky, and our bed is comfy, and our neighbor probably ought to know better. 

And yet, what Jesus wants to know is: will we persist in being Christians then, when for every understandable reason, we don’t feel like it? 

As Willie Mays once said, “It’s not hard to be good from time to time…What’s hard is being good every day.”[2]

So much is put before us precisely when we don’t feel like it, and it’s then that we must decide how to respond. 

This is what Jesus really means when he tells us to keep asking, seeking, and knocking. 

This is where spiritual persistence really comes in, and when our own faith convicts us as the ones who are constantly and most nakedly in need.

As we’ve said, left to ourselves, our sense of when to persist and when to quit, when to help and when to steer clear are scattershot at best.

They are sources of regret at least as often as they are of satisfaction.

But we are not left to ourselves.

With God’s help, we can become capable of a goodness beyond our own whims, and durable in all weathers. 

This is a moment when the weather seems especially difficult for so many.

A knock at the door comes, and it seems to have a new urgency to it, while the temptation to stay under the covers, safe and warm, holds an even greater appeal.

I’m praying that you and I both hear Jesus’ call to persistence this morning and take it to heart, and may our commitment to kindness and service make glad the very heart of God. 

Amen. 

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[1] New Living Translation: 11:9-10

[2] The Book of Positive Quotations, 641.