Prevailing Prayer and an Example from George Muller

Then once again I fell prostrate before the Lord for forty days and forty nights..... 

I lay prostrate before the Lord those forty days and forty nights because the Lord had said he would destroy you.

Deut 9.18, 25

Fernando:

Samuel Chadwick has said, “Intensity is a law of prayer. . . . There are blessings of the kingdom that are only yielded to the violence of the vehement soul.” He gives several examples of this type of earnest prayer from the Bible: “Abraham pleading for Sodom, Jacob wrestling in the stillness of the night, Moses standing in the breach, Hannah intoxicated with sorrow, David heartbroken with remorse and grief.” Such prayer when used in intercession comes out of a passionate commitment to the people.

Moses’ extended period of forty days of prayer reminds us of the importance of what we may call prevailing prayer. This is the type of prayer in which a person perseveres in prayer for an extended period of time until the desired result comes. Jesus told the parable of the unjust judge and the persevering widow to encourage such prayer. Luke prefaces the parable by saying, “And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). This is how the disciples responded when Jesus “ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father” (Acts 1:4). After Christ’s ascension the disciples “with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer” (Acts 1:14).

In November 1844 George Muller began to pray for the conversion of five individuals. He says, “I prayed every day without one single intermission, whether sick or in health, on the land or on the sea, and whatever the pressure of my engagements might be.” After eighteen months of such praying the first of the five was converted. Five years after this the second came to Christ, and the third after a further six years. Mueller said that he had been praying for thirty-six years for the other two and that they still remained unconverted. His biographer says that one of those two “became a Christian before Mueller’s death and the other a few years later.”

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Here's a great sermon on prevailing prayer by J. D. Grear.