STUDY THEME: CHRIST FOLLOWERS. 3-12-06.
“KEEP PRAYING.” LUKE 11: 1-3, 4-8, 9-10, 11-13.
PLEASE OPEN YOUR BIBLE TO LUKE 11.
Following the life of our Lord chronologically, there is a gap between Luke 10 and 11. This is filled in by John in John 9 and l0. It was A.D. 29 and Jesus was evidently in Capernaum because John 6: 66-67 says, “From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more. Then Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?” But Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also we have come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
John 7: 1 says, “After these things Jesus walked in Galilee; for He did not want to walk in Judea; because the Jews sought to kill Him. The Feast of Tabernacles was at hand. This feast occurred in October to commemorate the 40 years of wilderness wanderings when they had to live in makeshift housing.
In John 7: 3-4 the four brothers of Jesus urged Him to go to Judea, do miracles and extend His influence. They did not believe in Jesus until after His resurrection. He chose not to go up on the terms His brothers suggested. After the brothers left for Jerusalem, Jesus went up secretly and stayed all of Passion Week in the home of Mary, Martha and their brother Lazarus in Bethany.
The Jewish leaders of the Jews kept looking for Him. In the Middle of the festivities Jesus entered the temple and began to speak. Apparently it was the content of His teaching rather than his manner or diction that caused the astonishment. In John 7: 19-24 He charged the Jews with not keeping the Law.
The one healing that he had done in Jerusalem that made all men marvel but that turned the rulers against Him was the healing in John 5 of the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath
Between the things recorded in Ch. 10 of Luke and those recorded in Ch 11 Jesus went up to Jerusalem and there opened the eyes of the man born blind.
The Gospel of Luke emphasizes payer, especially the prayer life of Jesus. He prayed at His baptism in Lk. 3: 21, before He selected the Twelve in Lk. 6: 12, before He ask the disciples who He was in LK. 9:18, when He was transfigured in Lk. 9: 28-29, in Gethsemane in Lk. 22: 42, as He was crucified in Lk. 23: 34, and as He died in Lk. 23: 46.
Let’s look now into the first 13 verses of Luke 11 which are concerned with the matter of prayer.
PLEASE READ LUKE 11: 1-4.
Luke 11:1 shows that the disciples were aware of the prayer life of Jesus. He had been praying in a certain place. This was not unusual, but after He had finished, one of his disciples asked Him to teach them to pray.
This must have thrilled Jesus’ heart. He wanted to teach them to pray, but He had waited for the teachable moment to give them the words of vs. 2-13.
If you had been one of the first disciples walking with Jesus, what is one thing you would have wanted to learn from Him? The Twelve, as well as the others who regularly followed Jesus, saw Jesus do some incredible things. Miracles of healing, Power over nature, And the words He communicated were like nothing heard before. There were occasions Jesus sent the disciples out on mission, but how could they equal what Jesus did: That is what makes their request so interesting.
There is no record that the disciples asked Jesus to show them how to teach. Or heal. Their one request, “Teach us to pray.” In all that they saw and heard, they connected Jesus’ effectiveness with His prayer life, His communion with the Father. In this lesson we will learn from the Master what we are to pray for and how we are to pray for those things.
Prayer is the normal expression of divine life, just as breathing is of natural life. Of every newborn soul it can be said, as of Saul of Tarsus in Acts. 9: 11, “Behold, he prayeth.”
But there are certain spiritual laws in connection with our blessed Lord. He was Himself a man of prayer in the days of His humiliation here on earth and He is still the great Intercessor at the Father’s right hand.
In response to the disciples’ request, He gave them the outline of what is commonly called “The Lord’s Prayer.” Strictly speaking, of course, it was not the Lord’s Prayer, because He did not pray it.
Our Lord could to say the prayer as expressing His own needs and desires because He was the absolutely sinless One. He therefore could not pray, “Forgive our sins.” His disciples were still sinful men, as we are, and so they needed to come to the Father for forgiveness. It would rather be designated, “the disciples prayer.”
It is a model upon which all prayers may very well be formed. Used in this way, it fulfills the purpose for which it was given.
Jesus also gave a model prayer within the Sermon of the Mount in Matt. 6: 9-13. In that context, Jesus gave a longer version. While some of the wording is different, the basic elements are the same. We should not make too much of the differences because it is with those differences that we can see the beauty of this prayer.
Jesus did not intend to give us a prayer that was to be recited word-for-word the same each time, as though it was some mantra or somehow less powerful if the exact wording was not followed. This prayer is a model, showing the types of things about which we can and should pray.
The Model Prayer is inclusive of the things for which it is appropriate to pray. All our prayers---whenever we pray---are to be measured against the nature and petitions within this model prayer.
Before we look at the five petitions in this prayer, there are two things we should note. First of all, it is a prayer for believers. Only those who are God’s children may address Him as Father. Jesus referred to God as Father over 65 times in the Synoptic Gospels and over 100 times in the Gospel of John. By contrast, the entire O.T. only refers to God as Father 15 times and never within the contexts of a prayer.
Jesus, however, freely used the word Father to refer both to His relationship with God and to our degree of intimacy with Him. There is a difference, though, in our relationship to God the Father and Jesus’ relationship to Him. Jesus never used the phrase “our Father” to include both Him and others.
In Matthew’s account of the prayer, Jesus used the phrase “our father” because He was teaching His disciples how they ought to pray. The fact that God is our Father tells us that we are not coming to someone with whom we must plea, bargain or fear; He is a Father who lovingly desires to meet us and give His children the best.
Second, notice the use of the plural throughout this prayer. Us and our indicate that this is a corporate prayer. We can certainly pray this prayer privately and use its patterns with our personal requests, but it is to be used within the body as a whole. We are to pray these petitions with other people and for other people.
The Christian life is not an isolated existence, and we are to live out our faith with the community of believers. We pray together and we pray for each other.
Since these gracious words----words of infinite wisdom and infinite love---- flowed from the lips of the Son of man, the saints of every age and every language have used them, and found in them the perfect expression of their deepest feelings and truest needs, as well as the high ideal and standard of spiritual life, while on this side of the grave remains ever our actual attempt.
The prayer is short, that it may be quickly learned, easily remembered, and frequently used.
The disciples who asked Jesus to teach them to pray belonged to Israel, and had been brought up in an atmosphere of prayer. Yet, in the Law of Moses we find no direct command and no specific regulations, concerning prayer. For prayer is not so much a duty as a privilege, and, strictly speaking, belongs not in the law, but in to the gospel. We respond to the joyful sound of salvation. “When thou saidest, seek ye my face, my heart said unto Thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.”
We have the records of many prayers of many people in the Bible but we find that Jesus is both the answer and the teacher of all prayer.
Five petitions introduce us to what we should pray to the Father, and they are not in a random order. The first two petitions focus on God and His kingdom. Typically in our prayers, we come to God with our needs first, but Jesus calls us to focus on God first.
The first petition is “Your name be honored as holy.” Throughout Scripture, a person’s name represented everything about him, the totality of his being. God’s name represents His character and attributes; all that God is, is wrapped up in His name. Therefore, when we desire for God’s name to be honored, we desire for every thing about God to be honored as holy.
Isn’t God already holy? Yes, we can do nothing to add to His holiness, but we are praying that His holiness will be seen and made evident. To be holy is to be set apart, and we are placing our desire alongside God’s that He would be lifted up—set apart—and seen above everything else.
Our prayer should start with praise and the desire to see Him praised and known.
This first petition really takes precedence over all the others, and it should color the rest of our petitions. Whatever else we ask for should also be for the purpose of honoring God’s name.
There is no greater place where God is honored as holy than in His kingdom, so we pray Your kingdom come. God is most honored where He reigns as Lord and King. This request has both a now and a not yet element. Although the kingdom of God came in Jesus’ ministry and is manifested as He reigns as Lord in His church, the full and complete realization of that kingdom will not be seen until the return of Christ.
Personally and corporately, we pray that God will be honored and that He will reign as Lord of our lives even now, but we also pray with anticipation toward that time when His kingdom will fully come.
Matthew, in Matt. 6: 10 added the phrase, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” While this could be viewed as a separate petition, it is so closely akin to “Your kingdom come” that the two are hard to separate. God’s kingdom can only be established---whether in the hearts of individuals, in the church, or in the world---where His will is obeyed.
We now move from the petitions that focus on God to the petitions that address our needs.
The first of these petitions addresses our physical needs: “Give us each day our daily bread.” We would be amiss take this only at face value and see it as a request simply for bread. This request is an example of a part---in this case, bread---representing the whole---food or whatever is necessary to sustain physical life.
It’s OK for us to come to God with our needs, but we should make a distinction between our needs and our wants. Even legitimate needs can become wants if we ask with greed or selfishness. The request has to do with daily bread.
This may call to mind God’s instructions regarding the giving of manna to the Israelites. The Israelites wee to take only the manna they needed for that day, and they were to trust that God would provide what they needed for tomorrow. To want more than what we need this day smacks of greed or a lack of trust in God.
While the third request has to do with the present---meeting our physical needs for the moment---the fourth request has to do with our past: “Forgive us our sins.” Matthew used the term “debts”, a common metaphor among the Jews for sins, but since Luke was writing to a Gentile audience, he skipped the metaphor and referred directly to sins.
We should read this solely as the confession that leads to salvation, for we already have acknowledged that this is a prayer for those who know God as their Father. Our prayers should always include the confession of sin as necessary. Believers still sin, but when they do, they are to come right back to the One who freely forgives and cleanses. (1 John 1: 9)
This petition includes a clause expressing that God forgives us as we forgive others: for we ourselves also forgive everyone in debt to us. In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus stated in Matt. 6: 15, “If you don’t forgive people, your Father will not forgive your wrongdoing.”
God is certainly capable of forgiving, but the unforgiveness in our hearts renders us incapable of receiving God’s gracious forgiveness. The form of the prayer Jesus used in Luke’s account seems to assume that the believer understands this.
The fifth and final petition focuses on our future: “Do not bring us into temptation.” James 1: 13 says God does not tempt us. God does test us, but it is never with the intent of making us trip and fall. The situations we place ourselves in and how we often choose to respond to God’s trials may lead us into temptation, but that is always our own doing.
We are not praying, “God, don’t tempt me,” but we are asking God to help us avoid temptation. Prayer in its simplest definition is our acknowledgment of our need for God. If not why should we be talking to Him in the first place?
With that expression of dependence on Him comes the recognition that we are weak humans, capable of falling away from Him. We close our prayer, then, asking Him to keep us strong and dependent on Him, strengthened to avoid the temptations we might encounter.
2. PLEASE READ LUKE 11: 5-8.
One of the disciples had asked Jesus to teach them to pray. He began by telling them what to say or to include in their prayers. Then, in vs. 5-10 He taught them the need to pray and to keep on praying.
Jesus began to teach the need to pray and to pray persistently by telling a story, which is often called “the parable of the friend at midnight.” Jesus drew His parables from real-life situations, but the story often had some element of surprise in it. For example, this story reflects a situation that could arise; but the response of one man was surprising to those who first heard it.
Several facts help us understand the social setting. The setting was probably a small peasant village. The houses were close together. The houses often had only one room. The families often all slept on a pallet on the floor. They baked bread each day except for the Sabbath. Hospitality and friendship were highly valued in that society.
The word friend occurs four times in the story. The friend at whose house he arrived was pleased to see his friend, but the traveler was hungry and the host had nothing to give him to eat. The homeowner thought of his neighbor and went to the neighbor’s door at midnight and called out to his neighbor, who was also his friend. After explaining his plight, he asked to borrow three loaves. These were more like rolls in size than what we call loaves.
Now comes the surprise twist in the parable. The neighbor and friend ordinarily would honor this desperate request. He didn’t say that he had no bread: he said hat he and his family were already settled for the night. He complained that the man at the door was bothering him and his family.
In light of their friendship and the rules of hospitality, most of Jesus’ listeners would have loaned their friend the bread he requested.
In beginning the story, Jesus had asked His hearers to suppose they were the anxious host. Jesus in essence asked: “Can you imagine a friend who refuses to assist you in your undertaking to provide hospitality at the arrival of an unexpected friend? The answer to this question is, of course, NO! The first hearers of the story would consider the neighbor’s initial response to be very wrong.
But Jesus continued the story. The man at the door refused to take no for an answer. He continued to call out to his neighbor for help, and finally his sleepy friend got up and loaned him the bread he requested.
Vs. 8 is the lesson Jesus wanted to teach by using this story: “Even though he won’t get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence, he will get up and give him as much as he needs.”
Jesus made the same point about persistence in the parable of the unjust judge in Lk. 18: 1-8.
A widow asked a judge to give her justice in a dispute with an adversary. But the judge was himself unjust, neither fearing God nor caring about people. The widow did not give up. Instead she pestered the judge into seeing that she got justice. Jesus told that parable “on the need for them to pray always and not become discouraged.”
Both of these parables can be misunderstood if we think that the reluctant neighbor and the unjust judge represent God’s response to our prayers. The point of comparison is not between the neighbor and God but between the petitioner and the disciple. God’s response stands in contrast to the neighbor’s begrudging help, as 11: 9-13 will make clear. God is not like the reluctant neighbor or the unjust judge: we do not need to inform Him or persuade Him to care about us.
Why then is prayer to be persistent? (1) When we are deeply concerned about something, we keep on praying. If some close loved one were very sick, no one would need to tell us to keep on praying.
We live in a world of desperate needs. Do you pray persistently about the needs of which you are aware? (2) We pray persistently because prayer is communion with God. Some people pray only when they face a crisis they can’t handle. Christians pay to praise and to thank God. (3) Prayer transforms people to the degree we spend time with God in prayers. (4 ) Not only does prayer change the persons praying, but God uses intercessory prayers in working out His will.
PLEASE READ LUKE 11: 9-10.
We have learned that persistence in our praying reaps results. That is why Jesus immediately told us to keep asking…keep searching…keep knocking.
Asking assumes that we believe in a personal God who is capable of hearing and answering. The word for asking is the word an inferior would use in asking something of a superior, as the lame man did with Peter and John in Acts. 3:2. This would certainly be the word we would use in reference to our relationship to God. Christ, however, never used this word of His relationship to the Father. He used the word which means to ask someone on equal terms.
There is a rising scale of intensity. When we ask, we ask with humility, a conscious need, and an acknowledgment that we need God’s intervention in the matter. Searching builds on that. Searching implies action, even as we ask. We are often called to be active in the endeavors to have this need met. It is one thing to ask God for a job: searching means that we continue to ask but we also join God’s work by searching for His answer. We are ultimately seeking God, and the O. T. frequently equated “seeking” with seeking God. As we ask, we search, not just to find an answer, but also, to find God in the answer. The answer will be either No, Yes, or Wait.
Knocking brings home the idea of persevering. We ask: we search as we ask: and finally, we are persistent in both asking and searching. The ABC of prayer is ask--- seek--- knock.
With this threefold work on our part comes a threefold promise: It will be given you…you will find…the door will be opened to you. This is not a blanket promise that all prayers will be automatically answered in the way we initially desire. We must interpret these promises in the light of the rest of Scripture, which also teaches us that we are to ask according to God’s will and with a submissive spirit, even as Jesus did in Luke 22: 42.
Remember, we are not merely searching for the answer, but we are also seeking God’s face as He answers. As we seek and find God, our desires---and thus our requests----often change. God answers, but sometimes His answers include a change in our character or in the nature of our request.
PLEASE READ LUKE 11: 11-13.
We should pray expectantly because God answers our prayers. Jesus compared the Heavenly Father’s responses to His children’s prayers to an earthly father’s responses to their children. Jesus asked what a father would do if his child asked for bread. He would not give him a stone. If the child asked for a fish, the father would not give him a snake. If he asked for an egg, the father would not give him a scorpion. In each case, the Father would give his children what they asked for.
Compared to the perfect, all-loving, and all-wise Heavenly Father, human fathers are evil. They are imperfect human beings, but they do their best to give their children what they need. If human parents seek to give good gifts unto their children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?
Notice the word how much more? The parables in 11: 5-8, and 18: 1-8 are “how much more” parables. If a sleepy neighbor will get up and give his neighbor what he keeps asking for, how much more will the God who never sleeps answer the persistent prayers of His people?
If a corrupt judge gives justice to the widow who keeps pestering him, how much more will the righteous and loving God respond to the prayers of those in need? If imperfect earthly fathers seek to provide good things for their children, how much more does the perfect Heavenly Father give the best things to His children: the best gift is the Holy Spirit, the abiding presence of God within His children.
Many people complain that God has not answered their prayers. They think of praying as asking God for something, usually something they can’t get any other way. The prayers of some people are not answered because they are not in a right relation with God. Even God’s children do not always receive what they ask for.
Sometimes God’s answer is “No.” A father would not give his child a scorpion; neither does God give something dangerous or wrong. Sometimes God’s answer is “Later.” Often He does not give us exactly what we asked for, but He gives us what we need.
The Bible gives examples of people of faith whose prayers seemed at first not to be answered but were actually answered in God’s way and time. Paul prayed for God to remove what he called a thorn in the flesh. He kept praying for this, but the thorn remained. However, Paul believed God answered his prayer by teaching him that when he was weak he was strong.
Elijah prayed for God to take his life. God did not do that because He had other things for the prophet to do.
Our prayers must be made in faith, not only believing that God is able to do what we ask but also trusting that He will answer as a loving Father who has our best interest at heart. James 1: 17 says, “Every good and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the father of lights.”
NEXT WEEK FROM LUKE 15 “WE CELEBRATE WHEN PEOPLE COME TO CHRIST.”
A.V. DAUGHERTY altav@swbell.net http://theweeks/av/