The Kind of Prayer God loves to Answer!

1 Now Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he stopped, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” 2 So he said to them, “When you pray, say:
Father, may your name be honoured;
may your kingdom come.
3 Give us each day our daily bread,
4 and forgive us our sins,
for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.
And do not lead us into temptation.”
5 Then he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, 6 because a friend of mine has stopped here while on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him.’ 7 Then he will reply from inside, ‘Do not bother me. The door is already shut, and my children and I are in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, even though the man inside will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of the first man’s sheer persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.
9 “So I tell you: Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Luke 11 v 1-10

Philip asked me to preach on “Our Father who art in heaven,” and unbeknownst to me the Archbishop of York would be addressing this same phrase in his opening address at Synod this week! Archbishops sometimes say very silly things, as did the Archbishop of York when he said (as quoted in The Guardian), “Our Father in Heaven is ‘problematic’ for people who have “father issues’ with abusive parents or who suffer in a male dominated society”. To which my old friend Rev Dr Chris Sugden replied: “The Archbishop seems to be saying that Jesus himself got it wrong when asked how to pray, and he commanded his disciples to pray “our Father,” or perhaps the Archbishop is saying that Jesus did not have sufficient heart, love and pastoral care for those who suffer in abusive families? Or is he saying that prayer is really all about US??

And that brings us right into the Gospel today, where the disciples came upon Jesus while he is praying (11:1). Now remember, these disciples are just like you and me. They’d gone to church, said the blessing before meals, and watched their parents and others say prayers. Prayer was nothing new to them. They’d done it all their lives.

But when they come upon Jesus praying, they were astonished! They saw him address God as “Abba,” Father, literally my dear dad. Jesus prayed to God with a direct, personal intimacy they had never experienced before. They heard that intimacy in the tone of his voice; they saw it in his face. He really believed his “dear dad” was listening to him! In Jesus’ prayers they saw and heard a REAL EXPECTATION that an answer was already on the way! There was something so fresh and dynamic, so powerful yet personal about the way Jesus prayed that they said to themselves “We’ve been saying prayers all of our lives, but when we listen to Jesus praying, when we see him praying, we feel like we’ve never prayed at all. Jesus is connecting with God! How did we miss the connection?

So as soon as he finished the disciples asked him: “Lord, teach US to pray! NB:”—not teach us to preach/ not teach us to pastor/ not teach us to administer great programs– teach us to pray, because they recognised that everything Jesus did came out of conversational prayer with Father God!

Jesus didn’t just teach on prayer. He prayed. In fact, Luke emphasises the praying of Jesus more than any other gospel. He records nine prayers of Jesus, and seven of 1 the nine are only in his gospel. So, let’s let Jesus teach us about prayer. He knows about it from both ends: he prayed as a full human; and he receives and mediates prayer as God himself. There is no better teacher on prayer than Jesus!

Let me make a few observations about Jesus immediate answer to the disciples. He answered them with a Pattern Prayer, a Parable and a Promise all wrapped together in these 13 verses. So, if you and I want to be students in Jesus’ school of prayer, we need to hold all three of these together:

• Jesus offers us a PATTERN PRAYER in vv 1-4: We call it “The Lord’s Prayer” and we pray it ALL the time. But let’s not allow our familiarity with the Lord’s Prayer to obscure the PATTERN he invites us to follow
  • It begins with a personal relationship: Abba Father
  • It moves immediately into praise and worship Hallowed be your name! literally “Glorify your name LORD!” …
  • Then moves outward to FOCUS on God’s will “Your Kingdom come, your will be done…
  • And then move into a humble dependency upon God for our own needs and those of others Give us this day our daily bread…
  • And then with a further, humble recognition that we are all sinners in need of forgiveness. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those…
  • And then a prayer to GUARD our hearts… Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…
  • And Finally circles back with Praise and worship. For thine is the kingdom…
• This pattern reflects the classic Christian four directions of spiritual life: Upwards (in worship) Outwards… …Downwards (humility, confession, forgiveness) … Inwards (heart), which dates all the way back to the Church Fathers
• But Jesus ALSO offers us a PARABLE in vv. 5-8: We call it the Parable of the Importunate friend, who gets bread for his midnight guests from a sleepy neighbour because he keeps banging on the door. Of course, it’s easy to read this and conclude that the lesson Jesus is commending is that God is like the sleepy friend and if you keep pestering God finally the old grouch will say ‘well to shut you up I’ll give you what you ask for’??! We’ll unpack that in a minute ☺
• Finally, Jesus offers us a PROMISE of answered prayer which concludes with a gracious Father God, eager to answer our prayers, far beyond the expectations we have of our own earthly fathers: “if you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (v. 13)

HOW MUCH MORE WILL YOUR FATHER IN HEAVEN GIVE YOU! Did you hear that? Not “say to the great spirit in the sky,” but rather say “Our Father…” Father God wants to give us what we need – and even MORE. Jesus is saying “this Pattern Prayer, amplified by the lesson in this parable, is exactly the kind of prayer God loves to answer! And as students in Jesus school of prayer, we want to pray the kind of prayers that God loves to answer—and in the same way, and with the same results, that Jesus prayed. **WHY does God love to answer this kind of Prayer??** Because this kind of praying has four features:

1. It is prayer that is God-centred and God-exalting. It is NOT about us and our hurts—it’s all about God!
   • We see this in verse 2. The disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray and the first thing he does is give them this “Pattern Prayer,” and it begins (verse 2), “When you pray, say: ‘Father, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy WILL BE DONE on earth as it is in heaven’“Notice two things:
     • The name of God is the first and main thing to pray about in prayer. “Hallowed by thy name.” That is, “Lord, I ask that your name—your reputation and your character and your honour—be reverenced and worshipped and glorified and exalted and esteemed and cherished.” First and foremost, in prayer, we ask God to work in human hearts to cause them to hallow his name, literally to give glory to God.
     • The Name of God is glorified EVERYWHERE—on earth as it is in heaven.” is a prayer for passion in the soul and revival in the church and awakening in the world. It’s a God centred prayer where we imagine what it would look like for God’s kingdom to come HERE ON EARTH—for what God wants done to actually BE DONE—in our own hearts first, then in our marriages, in our children’s and grandchildren’s lives, in the lives of our friends, in the places where we work, in OUR CHURCH, in our schools and government, in our nation, in whatever need God lays on our heart “God, in this situation, I’m not even sure how to pray. But God YOU know what YOU want to do in this situation, so GOD, DO IT! Let YOUR WILL BE DONE! And we desire this “whenever” we pray. And God LOVES to answer this prayer because it GIVES GLORY TO HIS NAME!
2. GOD ANSWERS because it’s a prayer from the heart of penitent sinners rather than perfect people!
   • God LOVES TO answer the prayers of sinners, not perfect people. **Remember another parable Jesus taught about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector praying in the Temple—in Luke 18, where the Pharisee was so proud of himself that he ended up literally praying to himself with his eye in disgust toward the tax collector, while the tax collector stood in the corner and beat his chest saying “Lord have mercy on me a sinner.” Remember Jesus’ punchline: “So who went home justified? Not that Pharisee! It was the tax collector because he humbled himself instead of exalting himself! (Luke 18:9-14)
   • We can become perfectly paralysed in our praying if we do not focus on the cross and realise that we are all of us sinners like that tax collector! Jesus is saying “Whenever you pray, be sure you ask for forgiveness for your ruined hearts.” Asking for forgiveness for our ruined hearts should be as much a part of all our praying as “Hallowed be thy name.” Jesus assumes that we need to seek forgiveness virtually every time we pray. In other words, we are always sinners. Nothing we do is perfect. And God does not turn away the prayers of sinners when they pray like this.
   • Jesus reinforces this posture of penitence in the promise which follows; in verse 13: “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” Jesus calls his disciples “evil.” That’s Pretty strong language! And he did not mean that they were out of fellowship with him. He did not mean that their prayers could not be answered. He meant that as long as this fallen age lasts, even his own disciples will have an evil bent that pollutes everything they do, but doesn’t keep them from doing much good. You see We are simultaneously evil and redeemed. We are gradually overcoming our evil by the power of the Holy Spirit. But our native corruption is not obliterated by conversion. We are sinners and we are saints. So, we pray in the spirit of humility that the apostle John taught us to pray in 1 John 1:7-9…” If we confess our sins HE IS FAITHFUL…”
3. God loves to answer the prayers of those who TRUST that HE will give us what is best for us, no matter what we ask!
   • That’s the point Jesus makes in vv. 11-13; Jesus says that ordinary dads will not give snakes and scorpions to their children when they ask for fish and chips! And then he adds, neither will God our heavenly Father. 13 “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” “How much more . . . ” will God respond positively to your prayers, since he is a perfect Father and not a defective father like all the rest of us dads are. Even we won’t give snakes and scorpions to our children. How much MORE will our Father in heaven give us exactly what we need.
   • In fact, Jesus says, your perfect Father will ALWAYS give you what you really need—more than the loaf of bread or the egg you think that you need. Jesus says you have a perfect Father who will give you the BEST— You ask for a loaf of bread or an egg. That’s a mere pittance. Jesus says “will not your heavenly father give you the HOLY SPIRIT?” You and I have an incredible father God who wants to give us THE BEST GIFT OF ALL, the Holy Spirit. You see, a perfect Father always gives to his asking children: and he gives what is best for them. God is Father and we are children. The Father always keeps the right to do what is best for the children even if they don’t understand why it is best.
   • God loves to answer the prayers of people who trust him to give them the BEST: That trust is expressed in the familiar prayer we pray at the end of Morning or Evening Prayer, where we pray “Fulfil now O lord our desires and petitions as may be best for us.” It’s an attitude that says, “God, I trust you to run the universe. You’re the father, and you know best! **And The utterly amazing thing is that he includes us in running the universe through such prayer! He really does respond to our prayers. They are woven into the fabric of causes that God wills to be moved by. We do not pray in vain. He is our Father. And when he hears his children, he responds. He is not deaf or indifferent or powerless. He hears and he acts especially when we trust him for the best. And…
4. God loves to answer prayers from people who dare to ASK with shameless audacity, bold persistence, instead of giving up!
   • And that brings us right back to the parable Jesus sandwiches between the Pattern Prayer and the Promise: Why compare answered prayer to a friend who is unwilling to get out of bed for the sake of friendship, but willing to get out of bed to stop the knocking on his door? Is it to say that God is tired or irritable or stingy? That can’t be, because God is so ready and able to give in verse 13. Then what’s the reason for this parable?
   • I’m grateful to Kenneth Bailey who did a study of Jesus Parables in Luke, Through Peasant Eyes as a Biblical theologian who knows Middle Eastern culture and tradition. He points out that among people who live in Israel and Palestine there is a sacred responsibility to offer hospitality to strangers. The bottom line is that it would be UNTHINKABLE to turn a stranger away at midnight. Jesus is saying here “if the laws of human hospitality forbid you from turning someone away, do you think God will turn YOU away when you come knocking at midnight? NO! That’s absurd!! God will do his part; but you and I must do OUR Part! And our part is to ask as shamelessly, as brazenly and as persistently as the man in this story! And ASK with specificity: “Not one, not two, but THREE loaves please!!” If the friend had gone home after the first refusal, he would not have gotten the bread he needed. But since he stayed and kept on knocking, he got “as much as he needed” (verse 8). And note how many times Jesus says we should pray in vv. 9-10— “ask…seek…knock,” and when that wasn’t enough, Jesus knew he should draw home the point to jackhammer people who find it so hard to believe that Father God would actually answer their prayers…For whoever asks… whoever seeks…whoever knocks.” The point for you and me is this: Don’t give up!! Keep on knocking, keep on asking, keep on seeking!
   • A testimony of this kind of prayer from our lives: Praying daily for our daughter Carol, born at 24 weeks and hospitalised in Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit for 4 months and never giving up, sustained by the prayers of our home congregation during Communion, and how she was healed of both potentially fatal respiratory disease and blindness. The comment of the chief neo-natologist at Stanford: “I know something is going on here beyond what I can explain, so you keep doing your part and we will keep doing ours.”

Our Father God promises us the very best, far beyond what we could ever ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20-21). Our perfect father knows what we need far beyond anything we can ever feel or imagine. And because of that God loves to ANSWER the prayers of people like you and me who boldly come to lay hold of HIS promises, His provision, and His power—including the HOLY SPIRIT—as we pray for His Kingdom to come, and His will to be done, in every area of our lives!

This is the way that Jesus himself prayed—This is what compelled the disciples to ask him “teach us to pray”—in prayers that are god-centred and god-exalting, from hearts convicted of our own sin and eager for his forgiveness, hearts trusting God to answer whatever we ask with his best, and hearts that DARE not give up but boldly and persistently lay hold of his promises… **And when we pray this way, we can be sure that we too, like Jesus, will experience the same intimate and personal love, direction, provision approval and power that HE received from the Father when he prayed this way!**

“Therefore, when you pray,” Jesus says, “pray this way… Our Father in Heaven

Phil Ashey