Sermon Discussion Questions:
1. Read Luke 11:1-13. What stands out, seems strange, or clicks for you?
2. Why does Jesus use such a negative parable in Luke 11:5-8, and 18:1-8, to encourage us to pray?
3. What would you tell someone who feels discouraged in their prayers, from this passage?
4. Do you regularly pray the Lord's Prayer? Why or why not?
5. What do you want your regular rhythms of prayer to look like?
Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly. - Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Mat 11:28-30
28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” - Matt 11:28-30
Why a yoke? Because real rest requires work. What is good for us always requires some work. The path of least resistance rarely leaves us feeling true rest.
Which is why we use the term “spiritual disciplines.”
“…train yourself for godliness; 8 for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come,” 1 Tim 4:7b-8
First week: we need rest and only Jesus has it.
Second week: we need to sit at Jesus’ feet, and absorb in His teaching through meditating on God’s Word; reading the Bible.
This week: In Luke’s gospel, immediately after we are told of the story of Martha and Mary, and the “one thing necessary”—sitting at Jesus’ feet—the next story we are told is about prayer.
What do you do after you absorb in Jesus’ teaching? After you listen to God’s Word? You speak to Him. Inhale the Bible, Exhale prayer.
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Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. 3 Give us each day our daily bread, 4 and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.” 5 And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, 6 for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; 7 and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? 8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. 9 And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 11 What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; 12 or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
- Luke 11:1-13
The Pattern
Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” - Luke 11:1
Jesus was apparently a person who prayed in such a way that invited imitation. There was something about His prayers that resulted in the disciples realizing (1) I don’t pray like that and (2) I want to. When you read the gospels you may glance over the rhythms of Jesus’ prayer life without giving it much attention.
38 times we see Jesus pray in the four gospels—that’s more than Jesus casts out demons, more than He performs miracles. The only activity we see described or performed more frequently than prayer is teaching.
Some of these are remarkably intricate prayers (John 17); some are very simple (Lord’s Prayer); some of these are performed at climactic moments of the story (Gethsemane); some are incredibly mundane (Jesus’ prayer of thanks before He eats). There are many **instances of Jesus spontaneously breaking out into prayer (ex. Matt 11:25-27). But one theme we see frequently in the gospels is Jesus’ method of retreating for deliberate time to pray:
- And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. - Mark 1:35
- Before choosing the 12: “In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God.” - Luke 6:12
One common excuse that we all use for not praying more is that we are so busy. We are so overwhelmed, have so much to do. Consider: no one has ever had more legitimate needs to meet than Jesus Christ. Jesus could heal any disease, overpower any demonic force, and could teach God’s Word more perfectly than literally anyone else. Everywhere Jesus goes, He banishes darkness with the very light of His presence. Every day that Jesus was on this earth, as His feet swung out of bed, He would have had an ocean of need lap upon the shore of His attention.
- But now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. 16 But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray. - Luke 5:15-16
Have you ever considered that one of the temptations that presented itself to Jesus was the temptation to so fill His time with activity and service, that He would neglect His communion with the Father? You don’t have to go out to “desolate places” to pray, of course. Paul encourages us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17)—and certainly Jesus did this. Yet, He would retreat into quiet places and be alone with God. Why? Because Jesus knew that He needed undistracted, unhurried time with the Father in prayer. Not just prayers that came while going about His business for the day, but quiet and slow times.
Jesus Christ, the perfect, sinless Savior—who didn’t have a smartphone buzzing in His pocket—still knew that were He to live in this world of temptations and needs with deep roots in the Father, He would need to carve out time devoted to only one thing to give His attention to: prayer.
If Jesus needed that, why would we think we are any different? Our life is all about efficiency: how can I do the most at once? But communion with God doesn’t work like that. There is no “quick tip” or “life hack” to become a deep, spiritual person. Jesus never uses mechanical metaphors for spiritual life, only biological ones: a limb, a vine, a branch. And those cannot be manufactured. If a sapling looks up at towering oak tree and wants to know how he too can cast such an impressive shadow, the old tree will tell him: “Time and stillness.” Roots don’t grow if you won’t sit still, if you never give them time.
This is true of any relationship. I wonder if you have heard that the way you spell “love” to a child is T-I-M-E. That’s really true of any relationship, isn’t it? And it is incredibly inefficient. You can not schedule meaningful moments. You can invest reams and reams of time with your kid, with your spouse, with your friend, and it not seem to do much, and then, in fifteen minutes, there can be a moment where they open up. But if you aren’t there for it, if you haven’t invested the time, you’ll never catch those uncontrollable, irreplaceable moments. The bird sings, but not on command, and you must simply be there to hear it.
Where did Jesus’ profound peace, strength, and wisdom come from? His communion with the Father and the Spirit through prayer. His willingness to be less productive, to do less, to sleep less, to carve out quiet, still, deliberate time devoted to prayer.
The Prayer
And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. 3 Give us each day our daily bread, 4 and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.”
We know that Jesus had a rich and diverse prayer life. He did not pray the same thing, verbatim, every time. Read John 17 to see how detailed, how intricate Jesus’ prayers can be. Nevertheless, when Jesus taught us how to pray, He didn’t say: “Well, you just have to feel it out; I can’t tell you how to pray, you must have an authentic encounter with the Father.” No, He gave them a script. In heaven, we will be so perfected that we will not need a mental rope, verbal handholds to hang onto while communing with the Father. But we aren’t there yet. Now, with easily distracted or misinformed minds, we are helped by the trellis of praying the very words Jesus gave us.
I believe that you should pray throughout the day. I believe that you should bring all your feelings and worries to God and tell Him about them in prayer. I believe that you should regularly be reading through the Psalms and praying the very words of those Spirit-inspired prayers back to God. But, I want to encourage you to make the “home base” of your prayer life the Lord’s Prayer. There are five petitions in the prayer. Think of these as categories to move through in your prayers. Each of these deserve a sermon in their own right, but briefly:
Father, hallowed be your name.
- Hallowed means “sanctify, or make holy.” Something is “holy” when it is set apart, set above, unlike anything else. God’s name is shorthand for His character revealed in this world. This is a prayer for our own hearts, and the world around us: we want to see and we want others to see God as He really is.
Your kingdom come.
- This is a prayer for the fullness of God’s promises to come true in history. Sin, death, and Satan have been decisively defeated through the work of Christ. The foundation of the kingdom of darkness has been detonated and is now crumbling. The kingdom of God is ballooning into this world through the Spirit as He ministers in the Church. And it will soon wholly obliterate all evil. This is a prayer for God to do that soon, and for the Church—the place on earth now where the kingdom is located—to be a foretaste of that heavenly reality as we make disciples and call sinners to repentance.
Give us this day our daily bread.
- This is a prayer for God to supply everything we need to continue in our kingdom-minded mission. From food, to finances, to emotional strength, to rest, to fellowship, to (above all else) the bread of God’s presence, the sustaining joy of His person which we feast upon by faith.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive others.
- When we commune with a holy God, our lack thereof is exposed. We confess our sins as regularly as we ask for bread. And we ask the Father to forgive us, in the same manner that we freely and immediately offer forgiveness to others.
Lead us not into temptation
- After asking for forgiveness, we know that we don’t want to return back to the same filth. So we pray that God would preserve us from more sin. Further, we pray that He would shield and protect us from trials and hardships which would leave us more debilitated in our faith.
The Parable
Prayer is not mechanical. Prayer is not like magic. You cannot simply recite the right words and automatically get results; God isn’t a genie or a robot. He is a Person. He is the Person. And that means that though He always hears our prayers, He does not always answer them in ways that make sense to us. So, lest we be tempted to use the Lord’s Prayer like a spell, let’s examine the help that Jesus provides with the parable:
5 And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, 6 for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; 7 and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? 8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. - Luke 11:5-8
Inconvenience is the theme here. This neighbor is apparently a friend of the man in bed, but not a very considerate one. Who wakes their neighbor up at midnight for bread? Not only that, but he then continues to harangue this poor man (and his entire family) into giving him what he wants. You can imagine that when the door flung open, he did not hand over the bread with much warmth. Jesus, somewhat comically, points out that when the neighbor finally gives the bread, it isn’t because of their friendship—he just pestered him into it.
Why does Jesus tell us this?
To encourage persistence in prayer. The moral of the parable is how effective impudence is. God seems particularly interested…strange though this may sound…in us pestering Him with our prayers. The poet, George Herbert, has a poem called Prayer, where he links together a series of metaphors of what prayer is like. Most of them are flowery and sweet. But in the middle, he describes prayer in rather aggressive terms:
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The book of Isaiah tells us something that we would never make up, never believe, unless it was in the Bible: “You who put the LORD in remembrance, [that is, those who pray] take no rest, 7 and give him no rest” (Isa 62:6-7). Don’t give the Lord a moment of quiet as you pray. Or think of Jacob wrestling with God: “I won’t let you go till you bless me!” Or think of the Canaanite women, insisting that Jesus come and answer her request. Be bold in your prayers! It doesn’t matter if it is the middle of the night; it doesn’t matter if it feels like there are other things that may be more important that God can attend to. Burden Him with your burdens; weary Him with what wearies You.
Consider Jesus’ parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18. Jesus tells of a widow who annoys a wicked judge into giving her justice. The law-man, who doesn’t fear God nor respects his fellow man, eventually caves in to the widows pleas just because he can’t take it anymore. And Jesus tells His disciples: if a wicked judge, who doesn’t care about justice or the widow, buckles at persistent pleas, how much more will God, the righteous, loving judge answer the pleas of His people? “And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? 8 I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily.” (Luke 18:7-8a).
When you think about it that way, then the parables make more sense. In both parables, the recipient—the wicked judge or the sleeping man—are limited by things: sin and sleep. God isn’t limited by either of those. And if those limited human figures can eventually be worn down to answer the requests, how much more will the perfect, all-powerful, loving God? He isn’t sluggishly getting out bed in the middle of the night, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as He walks to the door. He isn’t some crooked cop from the Sopranos who is looking to be bribed. So when His elect, His people, come to Him in prayer, Jesus tells us that the Father “answers speedily.”
Yet, strangely, here is how Jesus ends his parable about the persistent widow: “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8)
Why does Jesus say that? Because God’s answers to prayer often don’t look like what we thought they would look like. Which is why Luke introduces Jesus’ parable with these words: “And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart,” (Luke 18:1). We need this picture of persistence because we will be tempted to “lose heart” in prayers. Meaning, you’ll be tempted to give up and stop praying.
I think this is why Jesus uses these parables of reluctant recipients to teach us to pray. God is not a man that you are waking up at an inconvenient time to answer your prayer. God is not a wicked judge that you are wearing down with your persistent requests. But that’s what it will feel like sometimes. You will pray, and pray, and pray, and pray, and pray…and what do you find? A shut door. Silence.
A door slammed in your face, and the sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that silence. - Lewis, A Grief
The Point
9 And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
These verses sound incredible. So incredible, they are hard to believe. Often, we ask…and do not receive; seek…and do not find; knock…and the door remains shut.
Why?
A simple answer could be that God knows better than you do and what you are asking for would actually be bad for you. A child may tell their mother that they are hungry and would like a marshmallow. The mother gives the child a sandwich instead. The child cries, this isn’t what he asked for. But the mother knows better than the child. She answered his request—he was hungry—but with what she knew would actually nourish him and not leave him with a stomach ache. Thus, if you are waiting for God to answer a prayer in a particular way, consider that He may already have done so, just not in the way you provided. God always gives us in prayer what we would have asked for if we knew everything that God knew.
But it isn’t always so simple. The point of the parables is to practice persistence in prayer. Why does God do that? If we are honest, it can seem cruel. Why?
Our small group last week was discussing the previous story in Luke of Mary and Martha, and someone mentioned how strange it was that Jesus—who can miraculously multiply bread, fish, and wine—just sat by while Martha was slaving away alone. Why didn’t He just snap His fingers and presto there’s lunch—no need to keep hustling around, Martha. Seems kind of cruel, doesn’t it? Unless, of course, there was something unhealthy buried deep in the heart of Martha that would only be exposed and confronted through the anxious panic we read of. Maybe there are worms in us that will only be dug up with the spade of waiting.
“I am not in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him” - Lewis, A Grief
Temptations while we wait:
- “He can’t, because God—if He is there—doesn’t answer prayers.” God is a faceless, force, so vast and terrible that He pays no mind to the specks of dust on a rock in the 98 billion lightyears of universe He made. “Answered prayers” are just people who got lucky. Or….
- “God answers prayers…just not mine.” God answers the prayers of good people, good Christians. They get the special treatment. God replies to their texts right away. He gets the notification for me, but just leaves it. And, it makes sense, after all…why would He want anything to do with me? If I were Him, I wouldn’t pay me any attention either.
11 What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; 12 or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” - Luke 11:11-13
Jesus confronts our deep suspicions we have about God. On the one hand, Jesus appeals to a self-evident reality: parents know how to take care of their children. If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father. You are not a better person than God is; you are not a better parent than God is. If your moral GPS is working well enough to know to hand your kid a fish and not a snake, then God won’t hand you one either.
But on the other hand, Jesus is touching the most sensitive place in our heart of hearts, the thing that makes us most reluctant to pray, that makes us most eager to be distracted, the thing that makes us most discouraged as we and lose heart in praying: Jesus tells us we are evil. What gives us the right to speak to God? What if the neighbor waking up the sleeping man was a faithless servant? And the sleeping man was the King he had betrayed? Would he approach the king in the middle of the night to give him bread?
The Bible says that we were by nature enemies of God. We had no right to expect God to give us anything but judgment for our rebellion against Him. The wonder of the gospel is that the One person who had the right to go before the Father and commune with Him—the Son of God, Jesus Christ—was willing to trade places with us. He died on the cross, taking our crimes against God with Him, and paying our debts, and if we submit to Him, believe in Him, receive Him as Lord, we now can be forgiven, washed, cleansed, and made righteous. We are united to Jesus now through faith. So our prayers, which we offer in Jesus’ name, come before the Father with the same authority and priority of Jesus Christ.
Remember, this is why Jesus teaches us to address God in his prayer as Father. You have the right to speak to God as your Father. No one in Jesus' day would have dared to address God as "Father." But we have that right in Christ.
Our prayers, therefore, are always answered. Ask, and you shall receive.
The health and future of our church will always be limited—not to the degree that our leaders are really skilled, that our programs are well organized, that our acts of charity are impactful, that our preaching is sophisticated and entertaining or that music is beautiful. Our church will always be limited to the degree that we pray. It doesn’t feel that way. It often feels like prayer is the least important thing we do. And that is why the prayer gatherings are always the least attended event a church puts on. But prayer is the only real work we are doing because it is the only work that directly calls upon God to act.
