Have you ever wanted to learn a new skill? If you want to be great, then you need to learn from a master. Cooking? Ask Gordon Ramsay. Acting? Denzel Washington. Basketball? Steph Curry. Now with digital technology, we have easier access to “learn” from experts. But imagine if you got the chance to study up close, in person. What would you want to learn, and from whom?
Well, that’s where we find the disciples in Luke 11. Their teacher Jesus is the master of prayer. And this is the sixth time already in Luke’s Gospel we find Jesus praying. Like a Good Teacher, Jesus offers them a model prayer, a shortened version of what we know as The Lord’s Prayer. It’s simple and reverent.
If only Jesus stopped there. But no, he keeps going. He tells an unexpected story, with an example not of reverence but of rudeness:
Imagine someone shows up at midnight, knocking at the door. You walk to the door groggily to see who it is. Oh no, it’s your worst nightmare of a neighbor. The one with no boundaries. Imagine a friend like Urkel or Kramer. They ask you to let them in so they can get some food for an unexpected guest. And you’re like, “No, get out of here, my kids are asleep, and if you wake everyone they’ll be up all night.” I mean, if you’ve got basic decency you’re not going to wake up someone’s kids. So you walk away, thinking that should do it. But no! Now he’s ringing the doorbell, your dog starts barking, he starts pounding on the door and shouting at you through your doorbell camera. Your kids are waking up, the rest of the neighborhood starts looking out the window, and you rush to the pantry to get food before someone calls the police. You open the door, hand the bread to your neighbor, and he just stands there, shamelessly, like nothing happened: “Did I do that?”
So Jesus pauses and says, Pray like that. Ask, seek, knock, pound down the doors of heaven, and stir up a holy racket. The Father delights in answering that kind of prayer.
Jesus teaches us to pray with shameless tenacity.1 To pray with relentless fervor, disregarding social boundaries, to not let it go until God opens the door. So I want us to look today in our Gospel reading at the prayer, the parable, and the promise. Sometimes the passage gives you three points that alliterate and you just have to go with it.
The Prayer (v. 1-4)
Jesus is praying all the time in Luke’s Gospel. This is the sixth time Luke shows Jesus praying, and he continues to do that in this Gospel account. On the Mount of Olives, in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the cross before he dies. Jesus is one with the Father and yet he is relentless in prayer. What does that tell you and me about the importance of prayer? Jesus prays continually in the Gospel of Luke because he is God’s Son, and he has a loving relationship with the Father. And they share in such a rich, abundant, eternal love, that when the disciples ask Jesus how to pray—because they’ve seen him do it so often he must know what he’s doing—that he invites them to call God their Father.
The prayer that he teaches them is similar to the Lord’s Prayer we find in Matthew 6. But that was in the Sermon on the Mount, given to a big audience. This prayer is taught only to his disciples and is a bit shorter than the Lord’s Prayer. But I want to draw out some key themes that are in both prayers.
First, I want you to notice how we are invited to pray together and for each other. We should call this version the “Disciples’ Prayer.” I want you to pay attention to the communal language in this prayer.2 It is not a personal, individualistic prayer. Jesus teaches his disciples to pray for “our daily bread,” to forgive “our” sins, that we practice forgiveness, and pray for God to save “us” from temptation. Jesus encourages us to pray together and for each other. Let’s intercede for one another. We should pray that no one among us is hungry. And we should do something about it if there is. We should share our burdens with each other, as the Apostle Paul instructs us, to make it known how we can pray boldly for your needs, for your forgiveness, for your deliverance from a time of trial. And when we pray together, guess what? We celebrate God’s faithfulness together. Let’s share testimonies and rejoice with the people who’ve prayed with and for us.
The second thing we notice is that we pray to God as our “Father.” From the beginning of his ministry, Jesus tells everyone that God is his Father. And because of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus invites us into the relationship he has with God the Father. Jesus stood in your place and now stands at the right hand of the Father so that you can approach the Father with the intimacy and boldness of his Beloved Son. We say this each week during the Eucharistic prayer—King Jesus gives us access to come with confidence before the throne of grace.
Third, this prayer models how to pray according to God’s will. Each week, we have a Collect before the Liturgy of the Word. A collect is just a prayer that sums up biblical teaching and prepares us to hear the reading of Scripture. If you’ll notice this month, we’ve had a lot of prayers about prayer. Two weeks ago we prayed the Lord would hear us and “that we may receive what we ask” and that he would “teach us by your Holy Spirit to ask only those things that are pleasing to you.” To teach us how to pray according to God’s will. And now today, we confess that God is “always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve.”
God is more ready to hear than we are ready to pray? This is at heart of this Gospel passage. God is waiting for you to knock. But I can testify that God has answered prayers I hadn’t finished praying yet. I can also testify God has answered prayers when I stopped praying and wasn’t paying attention and forgot to praise him. But God is more ready to hear than we to pray, and he desires to give us more than we desire or deserve.
And can I tell you something? I think we are frustrated God isn’t giving us what we want and we don’t realize our prayers are too small. Maybe your prayers look more like a personal gift registry but Jesus invites you to pray kingdom-sized prayers. Will you pray big and bold—for God to be glorified throughout the world and in our community? For each of us to have what we need and for all of our neighbors to have food and housing? For our neighbors to reconciled with God through Jesus Christ? Provision, salvation, and healing so that more can live and flourish under the rule of Christ our King.
Jesus is not merely teaching us the words to pray but forming our hearts to be aligned with God’s will. But if you think you’ve got the lesson, just wait for it, as he offers this parable. Jesus doesn’t just want you to pray rightly, he wants you to pray relentlessly. So he tells us a story about a neighbor with no shame, a real nuisance, who won’t give up. And Jesus says, That’s how I want you to pray.
The Parable (v. 5-10)
As you may have picked up when I retold the parable earlier, there’s some real humor in these verses. In Jesus’s day, most people lived in small houses and slept in a single room. But hospitality was important. To the point where the shameless nuisance of a friend is so embarrassed he can’t provide for his guest, he’s willing to wake up his neighbor’s whole family so their neighborhood isn’t known like Sodom as an inhospitable community. Receive a guest like Abraham did in Genesis 18 and not like Lot did in the next chapter.
The key verse here in Luke 11 is verse 8 and the word I want to draw your attention to is “impudence.” Jesus says the friend got what he asked for because he refused to go away. Because of his “impudence” his friend gave him the bread. Now, this is a word that I would avoid using in a conversation because I have a PhD. I don’t use big words like this because my desire is to communicate clearly and simply. Now the word translated into English as “impudence’ in the Greek language of the New Testament means “persistent rudeness, with no regard to social boundaries.” So when I say “shameless tenacity” think chutzpah, nerve, gall, or guts. A can’t-quit attitude that’s not worried about what other people may think. That’s the posture of prayer Jesus wants you to have.
A classic example of this kind of prayer in the Bible is actually of Abraham in our Old Testament reading from Genesis 18. The Lord visits Abraham and shares with him what he is about to do in Sodom. And Abraham has the chutzpah, the nerve, to look at God and say: “Far be it from you Lord” to do this and then he proceeds to haggle with God to preserve the righteous and spare the wicked. Abraham foreshadows Jesus’s own intercession for us—that he who knew no sin, the perfectly righteous one, would become sin for us, that we might become right with God.
Jesus finishes the parable and offers this lesson in verse 9: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” God is not groggy or reluctant to open the door. But God doesn’t want you to tap lightly and walk away either. Jesus is saying that God wants you to pound on the doors of heaven and refuse to go away until he answers. Jesus is inviting you to pray with shameless tenacity, to approach God with some nerve, and to become a nuisance waiting at the door. Notice that when Abraham is going back and forth arguing with God, the Lord stays with him.3 God isn’t in a hurry to get away from Abraham. And he isn’t in a hurry to get away from you either. He wants you to bring a chair and a tent and camp out at that door demanding God to open up.
What are your shameless prayers? Or better yet, what are our shameless prayers?
This week I had two remarkable experiences. On Tuesday, I met with the leaders of Somebody Cares St. Augustine, one of our local ministry partners. I learned about their mission to organize community service projects for those in need and to partner with the school district and provide care for homeless students in our county. I’m exploring how we can strengthen our partnership but also for us to be active in ministry to the schools just down the road from us. It’s your strong desire to reach young families and children that’s pushing me forward to explore these opportunities.
And then on Wednesday, I drove out to Camp Araminta in Melrose, where four of our students joined about 300 other campers from across the diocese. Now this camp happens one week only. Bishop Alex and several other clergy from the diocese were there every day leading this camp. I got to sit in on an incredible time of worship and see firsthand how they are investing in equipping the next generation for leadership. It was incredible. I want more of our students to go, I want students who aren’t even here yet to go, and I want to volunteer myself.
So… I’m inviting you to pray with me… with shameless tenacity. To pray that God will be glorified in St. Johns and Flagler Counties. To pray that God will supply our every need and send us out in the community so that no one goes hungry or without housing. To pray that God will send us young families and children who can be transformed by the love of Jesus. To pray that you can build relationships with your neighbors who don’t know Jesus or don’t have a church home. And you can invite them to church. . . even if they’re over the age of 50. We want to pray for God’s reconciling love no matter who they are or how old they are.
Today I’m challenging you to pray with us and for us that God would equip each of us for ministry and allow this church to be a home for the next generation. Jesus is telling you how to pray kingdom-sized prayers with a won’t stop-can’t quit attitude, banging on the doors of heaven, and stirring up a holy racket, demanding God to reveal his glory and send us out into the harvest he has waiting for us. Will you join me? Will you camp out at God’s door demanding him to provide for us opportunities for ministry? That we’re not going to go away or leave God alone? It’s all for his glory.
The Promise (v. 11-13)
God wants you to be the next-door nuisance who never leaves. Why? Because God is a good Father and he wants you near him. If you stay in his presence, refusing to leave, well… that’s exactly where God longs for you to be.
There are bad fathers, Jesus says, who still give you what you need. You may even have a father who’s given you nothing, and this passage stirs up fresh pain. But Jesus is saying God will give you abundantly more than you ask. God is a more richly generous or loving father than even the best ones, so imagine how much more he wants to shower his blessings on you if you’ve been let down.
The promise of this passage is that God longs for you to show up in the middle of the night and never leave, because he wants to show you that he will never leave or forsake you. God the Father delights in giving good gifts to his children, and most of all he wants to give you himself. He wants to give you the Holy Spirit.
Jesus isn’t just the expert teacher on prayer. He is our Great High Priest whose once-for-all sacrifice makes prayer possible. Jesus stands even now at the right hand of the Father, praying for you. And Jesus invites you to approach the throne of grace with boldness and shameless tenacity. Whether you are the knocking neighbor or the arguing Abraham, God wants you in his presence. He’s more ready to answer than you are to pray, so come and knock. He’s already waiting at the door.
Tim Keller, Prayer, 231. Keller uses the phrase “shameless audacity.” Keller uses the phrase “shameless audacity.” I chose the word tenacity to emphasize persistence, while shameless still supplies the seemingly inappropriate rudeness of sticking around.
Darrell L. Bock, Luke 9:51-24:53, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, 1051, 1063.
Joyce Baldwin, Genesis 12-50, The Bible Speaks Today Commentary, 74.
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