When it is said
It comes from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and has no set place in the Church’s services.
John prayed it each time his battle came back, so it is a line to say again and again, as often as the struggle returns.
Pray it when something you have asked God to take away is still there.
Where it comes from
Author by tradition
Who was John the Dwarf?
John the Dwarf was a monk of the Egyptian desert. His teacher at Scetis planted a dry stick and told him to water it every day until it bore fruit. The water was so far away that John set out each evening and came back each morning. After three years the stick bore fruit, and his teacher carried it to church as “the fruit of obedience”.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 65, col. 204
The story behind the prayer
John once asked God to take away his passions, and God did. Free of every care, he told an old monk that he had no battle left to fight. The old man told him to pray for the battle to come back, with the humility he once had, because the soul grows through its battles. When the battle returned, John asked for patience in it instead of asking God to end it.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 65, col. 208; E. A. Wallis Budge, The Paradise of the Holy Fathers (1907), vol. 2
Kept among the sayings on patience
The story survives in the Greek, Latin and Syriac versions of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The Latin translation by the deacon Pelagius of Rome sorts the sayings by subject. It places John’s story in the part called “On patience or fortitude”.
The Sayings of the Elders in Pelagius’s Latin, in Migne, Patrologia Latina 73
What the words mean
Which battles?
John’s word is the Greek word for war. The war he meant was the one inside him, against his passions. A passion, in the old Greek sense, is an urge such as anger, desire or jealousy that takes violent hold of the soul.
The Philokalia, translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, vol. 1, glossary
In Greek
Δός μοι, Κύριε, ὑπομονὴν ἐν τοῖς πολέμοις.
From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the Greek alphabetical collection, in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 65.