Intro
We’re on our third week of this prayer series, and somehow, up to this point, we have not talked about cute children’s prayers. How is that possible? Let’s rectify it right now. There was a boy once who was praying with his dad, and the boy began his prayer, “Dear Harold”. And the dad was super confused. Why was he calling God Harold? The boy said that’s how they had taught him to pray in Sunday school: “our father, who art in heaven, harold be thy name.” That, of course, is a bit of a corruption of the old King James version of the first line of the Lord’s prayer, which is what we’re getting into today. And in this prayer, and in some of Jesus’ teaching afterwards, he gets into the topic of asking God for things. We’re talking about the right requests to make in prayer.
Going back to children, kids get that they are to ask God for things in prayer. Some of the things they ask for are…unconventional. Here are a few. Now, I have to say that I have no idea if these are real, actual prayers. I googled funny kids prayers, and these are what came up. One kid prays, “Dear God, I need you to make my mom not allergic to cats. I really want a cat and I really don’t want to ask my mom to move out.” Another: “Dear God, please don’t let it rain on Saturday, the first ball I hit will be for you.” Another: “Dear God…can you get me a Smartphone…Santa must have forgot.”
Another one: “Dear God, I love Christmas and Easter. Could you please put another Holiday in the middle, there’s nothing good in there now.” And finally: “Dear God, please take care of my daddy, mommy, sister, brother, my doggy and me. Oh, please take care of yourself, God. If anything happens to you, we’re gonna be in a big mess.”
What are we supposed to ask God for? Here’s Luke 11:1-13:
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” 2 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 Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.’” 5 Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6 a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ 7 And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need. 9 “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.10 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. 11 “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Luke 11:1-13
1. The goodness of requests
I want to start with that last section, which is about asking and receiving, seeking and finding, knocking and the door being opened. And let’s say the obvious: Jesus instructs us to ask. He commands it. These are imperatives. It is fundamentally good to ask for things in prayer. Some people go, “oh, I wouldn’t ask God for anything. I mean, He’s got enough on His hands, I’m doing ok, so I won’t bother Him”. That sounds pious, but it’s actually disobedient. There’s this story in the Bible about a king named Ahaz, who was actually a pretty wicked king. And the prophet Isaiah comes to him and tells him that God is going to deliver Judah from its enemies, and tells Ahaz to ask God for a sign to confirm it. And Ahaz goes, “oh, I wouldn’t do that, I won’t ask, because I won’t put the Lord to the test.” And Isaiah essentially says, “you idiot! God is telling you to ask Him for a sign!” (a paraphrase of Isaiah 7:12-13). It’s good to ask God for things in prayer.
It’s good because it acknowledges our need for things that we can’t do on our own. This goes back to what we talked about last week in terms of the posture of our prayers. Our heart posture needs to be this humble, dependent trust on God. We come to Him recognizing that we are creatures, that He is the creator, and that we need Him. One of the requests we hear at home from one of our kids is for more duplo train tracks. He doesn’t know how to get to the store and buy it on his own, so he asks us. We’ve got the money and the wheels! And this recognition of our need for God is right and appropriate as creatures and children.
Making requests in prayer is good because it expresses trust in God’s ability to give. If my kids stop asking for anything, and just sit there in misery because they don’t trust me to actually help them, something has gone seriously wrong! The act of asking implies faith that the person might actually do for you what you are requesting. Jesus gets at that in the last part of Luke 11:1-13, where he compares God to a good father. You’ve got to trust that He wants to give to us. We’ve been doing this prayer request campaign for the last couple of weeks, and it’s been amazing. We’ve had around 20 requests from people in our community, almost all of them people that we don’t know and didn’t have contact with before, and it seems in most cases outside of Christian faith. But they’ve seen our ad online or on the bus shelters, and they’re sending in a prayer request. Why? Because they are acknowledging that there’s a need they can’t meet on their own and there’s a seed of faith that there might be a God who hears and answers prayer.
And asking in prayer is good because it expresses a willingness to receive. It’s the posture of having your hands open. If your hands are closed, tight to your chest, and God wants to give you something, will you receive it? Try catching a ball that way. It will hit you in the face, unless you open up your hands. Asking is opening our hands to receive what God wants to give us.
So making requests in prayer is good. It pleases God. In fact, Jesus says that God wants to give, wants to reveal Himself, wants to open the door. But we need to say that there are conditions to this promise. There are conditions in the context of the passage and the Bible as a whole that we need to be aware of. This is not a blank cheque- anyone remember that movie Blank Check, where this kid receives a blank cheque from a rich guy, writes in 1 million, and just goes to town with extravagant purchases? This is not the genie from Aladdin, to use another 90s movie reference.
2. The manner of requesting
What are those conditions? Here’s one: how we ask. My willingness to give to my kids depends on the manner of their request. Sometimes at the table I hear this, “get me a washcloth!” And I’m like, “heck no!” I’m not going to reward that, I’m not going to respond to that, even though there’s maple syrup all over their hands. I need to hear the request in a different way.
That’s a bit like prayer, but the manner of requesting that God desires might surprise you. Jesus gets at this in the parable he tells in 11:5-8. It’s a parable that’s similar in a lot of ways to one we’ll look at in more detail next week, so I’ll be briefer here. There are three people involved: a traveller, a friend, and a friend of that friend who’s asleep with his kids at home. The traveller arrives and is hungry, the friend doesn’t have any food, and so he goes to the sleeping man’s house to ask for bread. And Jesus says that despite the inconvenience, he’ll respond positively. Why? Not just because of their friendship. Instead, it is because of one of two things, depending on your translation. The wording might mean that it is because of the shameless audacity of the friend who awakens his neighbour. It might also indicate the desire of the sleeping neighbour to avoid being shamed by others. He wants to save face, because the whole village will know if he refused the request. This would be terrible, because hospitality is a really big deal in the Middle East. Houses are small, in close proximity to each other, so everyone will know. In order to avoid this shame, he will respond to the prayer. In either case, it is the boldness and confidence of the one requesting the bread that brings about the desired response.
Recognize that this is different from an entitled, arrogant asking. The guy isn’t proud- he doesn’t have any bread! He’s broke! He knows he’s got nothing, that’s why he’s asking! This is the tax collector, not the Pharisee from last week. He’s coming in dependence. But that doesn’t mean that he isn’t bold and loud about his request. He asks passionately, trusting that the neighbour will want to help him out.
I’ve been reading a particular book on prayer (Teach Us To Pray, edited by D.A. Carson). Some of the chapters are written by people around the world talking about their culture’s prayer habits. There’s a lot of talk today about humbling ourselves and learning from other cultures. To me, this isn’t just a nice, mushy idea. When it comes to the global church, it is desperately, urgently needed for us Westerners. Learning from the church around the world is a matter of life and death for us because the church in the West is in decline. It’s in freefall in some places. However, the Gospel is experiencing explosive growth elsewhere. We’d better learn from them if we want things to turn out differently here! And one of the churches that we have a lot to learn from is the church in China.
Here’s how a minister in China described the kind of prayer they witness in the churches there:
“They are storming the gates of hell and shaking the Throne of Grace.”
Chinese minister
Let me ask you, does that characterize your prayers? Does it characterize the kind of praying you’ve heard in our culture, in our churches? Storming the gates of hell and shaking the throne of grace? Come on! She continues, “even when they pray in dialects that I don’t understand, I can sense the earnestness of their prayers. I hear it in the urgent, pleading tone of their voices.” She said she has yet to hear a prayer in China that sounds bland. Prayers there are characterized by this desperate boldness. And this is what pleases God! The banging on His door, not because of our entitlement, but because of our brokenness and faith in Him! When we ask Him timidly, once or twice, when we pray without any emotion, without any investment, when we pray in a way that is safe and risks nothing, that doesn’t please Him! No wonder He doesn’t seem to answer our prayers, if that’s how we pray! He wants us to pray confidently, boldly, raising a holy ruckus, not because of our pride but because of the absolute poverty of our state!
3. The basis for requesting
So Jesus promises that when we ask, we’ll receive, but there are conditions implicit to the promise. One is how we ask. Another is the basis on which we ask: why are we making the request? Here’s what James says in his New Testament letter:
“You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
James 4:2-3
You ask with wrong motives. So what are the right motives?
Father/Child
Here’s where we get into the Lord’s prayer, or the disciples’ prayer. What’s the first thing Jesus says? “Our Father”. Jesus uses an Aramaic word here, “Abba”. It was rare and uncommon for Jews to address God in such an informal way. Some have suggested that this term was so affectionate, so tender, that it could be translated as “daddy”. We’ve been getting at this in a number of ways this morning, that how we make requests of God is similar to how a kid makes requests of his father. That’s got to be the basis on which we pray: our father/child relationship with Him.
Think about a young kid and the kinds of requests they make. “Daddy, can you play with me? Can you spend time with me?” “Daddy, I’m hungry, can you get me some food?” “Daddy, I made a mess, I spilled something, can you help me?” “Daddy, I have this problem and I don’t know how to solve it?” (Usually, in kid language, this is “ahhhh!!!! Daddy help!”) “Daddy, I want to build this thing but I don’t know how, can you help me?” And so God is like a good father who wants to spend time with us, wants to help us, wants to come alongside of us. And as a father, I can tell you how much it warms my heart when my kids are tender like this towards me. When they curl up in my lap, when they express their desire to be with me. God is like a good father, and we make our requests based on that.
I need to point out, though, that this calling God “father” is not based just on us being human. It’s not that everyone is God’s child in this way, as much as that’s the mindset in our culture. The Biblical language emphasizes that God’s children are those who are part of His people, His covenant community. In the New Testament especially, it is those who have trusted in God’s Son Jesus. It is those who have become “in Christ” and are adopted into God’s family themselves. Paul, in the book of Romans, says that it is because of the Holy Spirit that has been given to us that we can cry out “Abba Father” (Romans 8:15). It is on the basis of our faith in Jesus and our reception of the Holy Spirit that we can call God “Dad” and make requests of Him on that basis.
God’s glory
The other basis in the prayer Jesus gives is a desire for God’s glory. This is expressed in two ways: let your name be hallowed and let your kingdom come. These two requests are set apart from the next three in terms of their phrasing and structure. They’re the basis for what comes afterwards, but they are requests. They’re not statements. They’re not saying “this is how it is”. They’re saying “let these things be true”. That’s how the Greek puts it.
“Let your name be hallowed”. What does that even mean? Not Harold, remember, but hallowed. It means for God’s name to be understood and spoken of as holy. It’s for God’s name to be lifted high. And the name means more than the actual letters that form the word “God”. It means His character and His being. It’s a way of talking about who God is. The prayer is that the world would see God for who He is, that He would receive the worship and the reverence that is right and appropriate regarding who He is.
Let’s be real here: God’s name is not hallowed in our city or in our culture. Think about the name itself. You are far, far more likely to hear the name of God or the name of Jesus used in a profanity or an exclamation than as an authentic address. I was talking to a neighbour friend of mine who is a Muslim, and a number of times he used Jesus’ name in this way. And the thought hit me- I didn’t say this, though maybe I should have- how would it go over for me to use the name of Muhammad in the same way? Would that go over well? The irony is that Christians hold Jesus much higher than Muslims hold Muhammad. We believe Jesus is God in the flesh, not a prophet. But think about it more broadly too. We bear the name of Jesus, right? The church is the body of Christ, the people of God. How are we spoken of? How are churches that want to be true to the word of God held in our society? I can tell you that in some quarters, we’re dragged through the mud. We’re deemed dangerous, irrelevant, regressive, and so on. But the prayer here is not that our name be glorified, but that God’s name be reverenced, be hallowed, and so on. It’s that the tide would be stemmed and that the world would see God for who He is.
The second request here is that God’s kingdom would come. If the first request is for God to be God in the eyes of the world, this request is for God’s ways to become the ways of the world. The kingdom is where God rules. It’ where things are as He wants them to be, where people follow Him as King. The fullness of this Kingdom will only come in the new heavens and the new earth. That’s when God will make all things new and judge evil forever, resulting in the full establishment of the Kingdom. But the message of the New Testament is that in Jesus, the Kingdom of God has already broken into the present, into our world. In fact, it continues to break into the world wherever the Holy Spirit is moving in and through the body of Christ, the church.
I love talking about revival. Well, this is revival! It’s the inbreaking of the Kingdom! It’s eternity breaking into the present. And really, it’s the church truly being the church, truly being the body of Christ. It’s getting back to normal, New Testament style. In Jesus, the Kingdom is our “new normal”, and we pray for the Kingdom to break in desperately. I love what Leonard Ravenhill says here- yes, here’s the obligatory Leonard Ravenhill prayer quote. Do you remember his name yet? Have you bought one of his books off of Amazon yet? Come on! He’s talking about how our desire for revival, as churches, might come because we just want the seats to be full and for the finances to be healthy again. He goes,
”We must not pray for revival as a cure for the empty seats in the churches. We must not pray for a heaven-sent deluge merely to extend to our particular body of believers. Prayer for revival must be pure…our first request concerning revival must be that God be glorified; afterwards, not before, will come our request for sinners to be saved and a believing that the heavens will be rent.”
Leonard Ravenhill, Revival Praying, 145
Our first request is that God be glorified, and after that we pray for other stuff. The basis is God’s glory.
To sum up so far, the basis for our requests of God is our relationship with Him and our desire for Him to be glorified in the world. If our requests are motivated by that, that’s going to go a long, long way in receiving what we ask for. And note, by the way, that these are the same two possible reasons the man in the parable gets up and gives bread to his neighbour: the relationship they have, and the prospect of being shamed by others. God’s much better than that. He does answer us based on our relationship, and He doesn’t just want to avoid shame, He wants people to know Him for who He is, in His power and His glory.
4. Content of the requests
Finally, let’s talk about the content of what we ask for. Don’t you love how I do that? I tell you we’re going to talk about what you pray for, and then I still spend the whole time talking about other things and only get to it at the end? That’s just how it happened. But I really believe that understanding all this other stuff- that we ask, how we ask, why we ask- is as crucial as what we ask. I really believe that even if we say the right words, if we don’t say them with the right motives or the right manner, it won’t make much of a difference.
Daily bread
Jesus tells us to ask God for our daily bread. However, note this: as D.A. Carson says, this is a prayer for our needs, not our greeds. It is a prayer for what we need to live in this world each day. It is not a prayer for extravagant homes and overflowing bank accounts. Remember, prayers that revolve around our lusts and our consumerism won’t get us very far at all. It’s a prayer for our needs.
A lot of us won’t feel the pressing nature of this request very often. Others, however, will. Going back to the church in China, I read a story about a family that had lost two goats. Livestock, as you’ll understand, are crucial for the livelihood of people in rural China. So the family searched everywhere all day, couldn’t find them, and that night went to a prayer meeting at their church. They prayed about these goats (remember, shaking the throne and storming the gates of hell), and after the prayer meeting, they opened the door, and there were the two goats just standing outside! I love that! God cares about our daily, practical needs. It’s right and good to ask Him for those.
Forgiveness
Next, Jesus tells us to pray for forgiveness of our sins. I wonder how many of us confess as a regular feature of our prayers? Do we confess our sins to God, are we sensitive to where we have fallen short and are continually coming to him for forgiveness and cleansing? This is something we all need and it is something that can only come from God. But it has implications for how we live. I mean, the prayer isn’t long, but Jesus spends the most time on this element. He points out that our lives need to look different if we are people of forgiveness. How can we receive the forgiveness of God if we are unable to offer forgiveness to others? We talked about this two weeks ago: prayer isn’t defensive, it’s not just a permanent retreat. It’s the place where we are empowered to live differently and be on mission for God. So prayer for forgiveness strengthens us to forgive others, it strengthens us to be people of mercy and reconciliation. The prayer sends us out.
Temptation
And then Jesus tells us to pray that God would lead us not into temptation. Understand that this is not a request for God to stop doing something It’s not asking him to not do something he would otherwise do. It’s not like that annoying friend who sends you every cat meme they can find on the internet, and you’re like “stop it already!” It’s not that God leads us into temptation unless we ask him not to. The right meaning here, according to the language scholar people, is that we’re asking God to cause us not to fall to temptation. We’re asking for strength from God to face temptation and overcome. It’s a prayer to live well in this world as God’s people, to be pure and holy and to reflect His character. This is really where the emphasis of the prayer lies: our life in the world and that we live it in a way that honors and glorifies Him.
The Spirit
And that leads me to a final request, one that I think is actually foundational and ties a lot of this together. It’s not a request that’s included in the prayer itself, but it come at the end of Jesus’ teaching about prayer, in verse 13. Jesus is completing the analogy of God as a good father, and he says that if you, who are evil, who are sinful, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? What is the request? The Holy Spirit! What is the best gift that the Father has to give, the epitome of all the good gifts that He wants to give? The Holy Spirit!
Let’s acknowledge that historically, this happened. After Jesus’ death and resurrection, he told the disciples to go to Jerusalem and wait for this gift of the Holy Spirit. So after his ascension to heaven, they did. They went and they prayed- presumably anticipating and asking for this gift. And ten days later, the Holy Spirit was poured out on them, they went out and preached boldly about Jesus, there were miraculous signs and wonders, and the Gospel exploded outwards. They asked and they received this promise. Some Christians say this prayer is now irrelevant. It already happened, and every Christian now has the Holy Spirit. We don’t need to ask for it if we trust in Jesus because we already have the Spirit.
I’m not disputing that and I’m also not trying to get into a debate about what Pentecostals call “the second blessing”. But I do think, quite clearly from the Bible actually, that some believers experience a fullness of the Spirit that others don’t. In the book of Acts, people who experienced Pentecost receive subsequent and further fillings of the Spirit (eg. Acts 4:31) . Leaders are chosen on the basis of their being full of the Spirit or not (eg. Acts 6:3). Paul, in the letter to the Ephesians, tells them to be continually filled with the Spirit (Ephesians 5:18). In other words, we can “leak” and we need to be continually filled.
We can try to live apart from the power of the Spirit. Some Christians, maybe the majority, live on the subsistence level of Christian life. This is compounded by the anxiety some churches experience as soon as there’s any talk about the Holy Spirit. Some churches almost break out into hives! We don’t want to be like those crazy guys over there, we say!
But listen, Jesus told us to ask for this gift! He said the Holy Spirit was a good gift, maybe the good gift, that the Father has to give us! It’s like a father saying to a child, “I’ve got something for you, it’s going to change your life, it will give you so much joy, it’s a way for you and me to grow in our relationship, I’ve been wanting to give this gift to you.” And you, as a child, crossing your arms and saying “no! I don’t want that gift! I’m scared of it! I’m better off without it!” What does that say to the Father? He wants to give you a gift, but you refuse it? So brothers and sisters, I want to ask you to ask for this gift with me. To join me in yearning for, longing for, boldly requesting God for more of the Holy Spirit.
In fact, all the requests in this prayer really only make sense in that light. How will God’s name be reverenced in a city like ours without the outpouring of the Holy Spirit? How will the kingdom break in, how will the church truly be the church, without the Holy Spirit awakening us and opening our eyes? How will we live lives of empowered holiness without the Holy Spirit? Even the daily needs, though we might not all experience them ourselves- how will we know to be the answer to those prayers of others if we are not filled with the Spirit and sensitive to His voice?
So above all else in your prayers, ask for this. Ask for it boldly, ask for it on the basis of your desire to know God as Father and to see His glory break through. Ask for the Holy Spirit. Jesus promises that God will give us this gift. Will you join me in asking?
