Luke 11:1-13
Jesus prayed.
Jesus prayed.
Jesus prayed.
I often think about prayer as just talking to God. Keep it simple. Don’t complicate it. Just pray. Talk to Him. Pour out your worries. Confess the darkness inside your heart. Cry out in pain. Weep. Rejoice. Laugh. Just talk to God. But when I pray, it’s always broken because I’m broken.
Luke tells us that “it happened that while Jesus was praying in a certain place…” He doesn’t tell us where. I don’t think it matters. Jesus was praying. And I think His disciples were there and they could hear Jesus praying. What did that sound like? Have you ever heard someone overwhelmed with love for God, filled with the Spirit of God, in deepest communion with God as they pray? It’s otherworldly. Sacred. Holy.
What did the disciples hear as Jesus prayed? Surely they heard words. Jesus talked to His Father just like we do. But this isn’t just a guy praying. It is the God the Son praying to God the Father. Oh, how much love would they have heard in those words? How much longing? How much joy? Did Jesus laugh as He prayed, overwhelmed with delight to simply be talking to His Father? I wonder if He moved his hands around like I do? How much of the praying time was silent from the disciple’s perspective? Maybe all of it! But when He had finished, one of the disciples (and we don’t know who) asked, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.”
Oh, silly disciples! They had no idea. How could they? We still don’t really have any idea who Jesus is and we have the whole Bible and the Holy Spirit and what little we know and what even less we understand pales in comparison to the reality of who Jesus truly is. They want Jesus to do something like John the Baptist did. They want Him to teach them to pray. I think something in the way Jesus prayed made them long to pray like that. Apparently up to this point Jesus hadn’t taught them how to pray. Although I think Jesus was teaching them all along, they were just, like me, too distracted and dull to get it. Jesus doesn’t rebuke them. He just teaches them what is almost certainly the most famous prayer in the whole wide world: The Lord’s Prayer.
But then He follows with an illustration of a man who has some unexpected guests drop by late at night and he doesn’t have anything to feed them. One cannot host without feeding in a Near Eastern culture. And to not host is to fail to show hospitality and that is simply not ok. The man is desperate. So, he goes to his friend, and I like to think that his friend was his actual next-door-neighbor because we all need people who live next door who can help us when we’re in pickle. He asks him to lend him 3 loaves of bread. Not even give, lend. Like, I’ll pay you back man. I promise. I’m desperate because my friend has travelled a long way and I’ve got nothing, and Wal-Mart won’t open for another 1,900 years and I need help. But his neighbor is all tucked in, and the kids just now got to sleep, and softball practice went late and can’t you ask someone else. And it seems like the guy wasn’t even at the door but maybe at a window or possibly at the door but whisper-yelling in that annoyed loud whisper we all use when we’re trying to be quiet but failing badly.
Then Jesus says, “He will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, but because of his persistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs.” That word for persistence is apparently hard to translate; a negative participle placed before a word meaning bashful or shamefaced, like a downcast face murmuring out a request and this guy is the opposite of that. Audacity is probably a close English word. Chutzpah. Moxie. Boldness to the point of excessive daring.
Jesus then commands:
Ask, it will be given! Seek, you will find! Knock, it will be opened to you!
Wait. What?
This is how Jesus wants us to pray? Like a guy so desperate to demonstrate care and love to his friend that he is willing to annoy his other friend and even look foolish with the audacity of his persistence. Jesus wants us to pray with a boldness that approaches the point of excessive daring. He wants us to be door-knockingly bold. Sleep-shatteringly persistent. Relentless. Hounding. Indefatigable. Bold.
Because that is how Jesus prayed.
God the Son talked to God the Father with boldness because He understood how great the Father’s love is. And He taught us to pray like our lives depended on the Triune God’s great love for us. Because it does. Jesus Himself lives to make intercession for us and is indeed interceding for us . Right now. Who then can separate us from such love?
No one.
Let’s pray like that.
Like children utterly embraced and surrounded and confident in their Father’s love.
I’d like to see what happens when we do. I think it will be a whole lot of fun.
Leave a Reply