May 14 Sermon: When You Pray

We believe in the power of prayer, don't we? We know that God hears us when we pray. We acknowledge this great truth. We have a confidence that because of the work of Jesus on our behalf, we know that he is interceding for us right now at the Father's right-hand. We hear the words of Scripture and we are convicted that all this stuff about prayer is in fact true, such as the prayer of a righteous person has great power. We see this as we look at James 5 16. This is a great truth. We believe this to be true. We even understand that even when we don't have the words to say, we know the scriptural truth that the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. We see this truth about prayer in Scripture. We know this, we understand this, we have a conviction about this. And yet, I'm guessing that many of you are like me.

 And often this conviction about prayer doesn't lead to action. There are a few people that I come into contact with that say they're content with their prayer life. The rest of them tell me they wish they were better. They wish they could do more. They don't know what to say. They don't know if they're doing it right, most people tell me the exact same basic thing, that they aren't sure of what to pray. They struggle with this. And so, as we come to this great passage here in Luke 11, we find ourselves able to greatly relate to the disciples here, don't we? We want to pray more. We understand we should pray more. We understand that there's power in prayer, and yet it seems as though the biggest obstacle for us is the same obstacle that the disciples had. For the disciples, it seemed that they wanted to learn how to pray. They weren't confident, just like you and I struggle with confidence in prayer. We find here as we come to this passage, how this is all set up, we find Jesus doing something that he is often doing in the Gospels. He is praying.

 Now, before we dig into the text of this passage, it's important for us that we think about what Jesus is doing here in this passage. The second person of the Trinity is taking time to pray. In a little bit later on here, we are going to confess our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed, and we're going to confess these words that Jesus is eternally begotten of the Father, that he's God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made of one being with the Father. And we'll also confess that through him all things were made. This is who Jesus is. He is God. And yet, what do we see here? He took time to pray. He is in his human flesh. He would have been subject to fatigue like you and I are, like anyone would be. He is embroiled in his ministry and could easily have avoided prayer because, well, he's God. What does he need to pray for? But what does he do? Instead of recharging his batteries with a nap or two to prepare for the grind of ministry. We see what Jesus does, and he goes and he prays.

 He takes the time to commune with the Father. This is something that we notice in the Gospel several times. We think of the life of Jesus and we naturally gravitate towards imagining Him teaching. We also think about maybe Him sharing parables along with doing miracles and having some conversations with people. But how often when you imagine the ministry of Jesus in your head, do you imagine Him praying? And yet the Gospels tell us He is doing this on a regular basis. His disciples are seeing Him doing this. He is praying. What do the disciples do? They ask Jesus to teach him to pray. Now, we also get this idea from the request that this is something that they're expecting him to do. In this time, this was in fact something that rabbits taught their disciples. In their time, the religious leaders did this with their followers. The disciples of Jesus clearly know that John the Baptist taught his disciples to pray, and so they asked Jesus to do the same thing for them. We find that Jesus is more than happy to oblige the request as we look at verses 2 and 4 of Luke 11 today.

 The response that Jesus has here in verses 2 through 4 shouldn't surprise us at all because we know the Lord's prayer and we know that others know the Lord's prayer. Even in a relatively secularized culture, it's something that many people, if not most people, are aware of. When I'm doing a funeral and we come to the end of the funeral service and we have the prayers at the end, I don't get nervous when I go to prompt people to say the Lord's prayer that they're not going to know it. The only little bit of thought that I have that something might go wrong is there's a bunch of Lutherans there and they'll say trespasses instead of deaths. Otherwise, I assume that the people in front of me know this prayer. Jesus gave these words to his disciples, and throughout the ages, his people have known these words. We know this prayer. He teaches this in the Gospel of Matthew as well in another context, in the context of the Sermon on the Mount. This is the prayer that the Lord himself has taught us to pray, and we know it. It's baked down deep in us.

 As we start to take a look at these words here from Jesus, I want us to contemplate something about these words that we can so easily say in a rote way. We can easily be thoughtless about these words because of the familiarity that we have to them. This is the question I want us to ask, have you ever stopped and thought about just how plain this prayer is? Sure, it starts out declaring the holiness and the Majesty of God, but it really isn't flowery language, is it? It isn't really anything too extraordinary here. We don't use the word hallowed, but that isn't a real flowery word. No, it's pretty plain statement. Holy is your name, basically. Within those who promote the false teaching of the prosperity gospel, there's this idea that when we pray, we need to pray audacious prayers. We need to ask for big things, otherwise God won't give them to us. This is out there all over the place. I think this is something that we see and think in our lives as well. We think we have to pray bigger prayers. We need to pray greater things. We need to use fancier language.

 But that isn't anything like what we see in Jesus' eyes. Jesus' teaching us here, is it? When we look at the prayer that Jesus teaches his followers to pray, we see that we praise God, and then he makes a statement about his kingdom coming. Now, this is something that God is going to do, regardless of whether or not we pray it. His kingdom will come. He is sovereign. He is in control. The kingdom will come. This isn't something great and audacious that we're praying here. It's a statement. It isn't a request centered on you and I either, is it? It's a request centered on the will of God. This is a statement of God's sovereignty and of his power that follows our statement that we believe that God is holy. This prayer is about God, not about us. But wait, there must be some audacious, bold words coming up in this prayer where we are allowed to pray for a private jet or expensive jewelry or something where we should expect big things from God, right? Wouldn't you think that would be the case in this prayer that Jesus is teaching us? Well, let's see here.

 What does it say? Give us each day our daily bread. As soon as we go to considering things that we are asking for, it's nothing audacious, nothing major. It's asking for what we need. Give us our daily bread. Again, a very simple statement. We're to pray for this daily bread. This is about trusting in God for daily provision, not that he would build us up with wealth or with possessions. We're asking God to provide the baseline of what we need here. Again, there's nothing outrageous in this prayer. It's relatively plain, isn't it? Then we're told to pray for our sins to be forgiven. Now we can definitely say that that is an audacious request. Definitely. As sinners, who are in rebellion against the Holy God, to ask for forgiveness is definitely something big to expect. But once again, this isn't a request that is expecting material possessions or earthly success or for us to be built up. Instead, it acknowledges the problem that each and every one of us has. We have all offended a Holy God, and this statement here acknowledges our need, and it acknowledges that our offenses are not against ourselves or against others, but our sins are against God himself.

 Well, then after that, we have another line about how we should forgive others because God has forgiven us. Again, something very plain, just an acknowledgement of God's grace to us and how we should show that same grace to others. We have this last line in verse 4. It's a request, lead us not into temptation. I guess, once again, you could say that that's a bit of a bold request, considering that we live in a world that is filled with temptation. But actually, isn't that a simple request? A request that we are called here to lay at God's feet, that we might be guided in paths of righteousness, that we might live a holy life. It's about the daily living of God's people. There isn't anything in this prayer that Jesus gives to his disciples and to us that's particularly flashy or spectacular. It's about the holiness of God, the sovereignty of God, trusting God with our daily needs, asking for forgiveness of our sin, and asking to be guided away from the things that might lead us away from living a life of holiness.

 Now, if you're like me, you might find some comfort in the fact that these are not really very fancy words. Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with having eloquent words or being good at prayer. But when we look at this prayer from Jesus, we don't see necessarily anything eloquent or spectacular, do we? At the base level here, what we learn is that prayer is about trusting God, right? And here, what do we see that we're not asking God to submit to our desires or our wants or our requests, but instead we're to praise Him and to trust Him with what He provides us as we desire to live a life of holiness as we serve Him. That's pretty simple, and that's definitely straightforward, right? Well, then why do you and I struggle to pray? Why is it hard? My guess is this has to do with two primary things. Now, we struggle with the exact words to say, and so we convince ourselves that it isn't even worth trying. Because we struggle with what to pray when we pray, well, I'm just going to mess it up. I'm not even going to try.

 I think that's one reason. Also, as fallen creatures who want to be in charge, we want to be God. As people who want to acquire influence and stuff for ourselves, we have an inherent distaste for submitting to the sovereignty of God, don't we? We naturally want to pray for what we want, for our desires. We want God to conform to us. We don't want to conform to thy will be done. The desire, then, in prayer is instead that we should put our trust in a good and loving God who does provide all the good things for his people, those things that he need, that we need. We can pray this prayer and all of our prayers trusting that God hears and trusting that he answers. and our prayers will shape us. They will form us to desire what God desires and will move us towards contentment in what he provides. That's the goal. Not to manipulate God or think that we can somehow get what we want, but to conform our desires to what he wills for us, his good and holy and sovereign will for our lives. The idea that God hears our prayers and that he answers our prayers for the needs that we have is where Jesus then takes the discussion after he teaches them this prayer.

 We move on to verses 5 through 8. Hey, there we go. And we see a short illustration that Jesus uses here. Now, this story is pretty simple and it's straightforward. We can understand it. A man has not prepared for the arrival of a friend. He doesn't have any bread to feed him. Now, it's important to remember that this isn't a 21st century issue here. This is not an interaction that you and I can use our context and really fully understand because getting bread for folks in the first century wasn't as simple as heading down to the store and picking out a loaf. The greatest difficulty that you'll have in making your decision is whether to splurge on the whole grain or to get the cheapest white bread you can find. That's our biggest problem in getting bread, either that or not getting there before the store closes. For them, they would have had to prepare. They have to make bread. It is not an easy thing. Now, we don't know if this gentleman who was in need of bread just didn't prepare for the arrival of his friend, or if it was a surprise that his friend showed up.

 But either way, it really shouldn't matter. Making or acquiring bread wasn't easy in the first century, and he should have been prepared for the next day just to feed himself or to feed his family. He should have had something prepared. Now, we get the idea that there is something deficient in this man's process and the fact that he goes expecting his friend to have bread. He doesn't have any, but he expects his friend to have some. That should tell us that it was a normal practice to be prepared for the next day, right? And also from the response of the man who's in bed, we get the idea that he's a bit annoyed with the fact that the breadless man hasn't properly prepared for having food for himself. Now, we naturally assume that the man in bed is being uncharitable here when we read this. But when I slowed down and considered the story for a while, I started to feel that there is a greater emphasis on the strange nature of the request from this man. I mean, who does this? Who does this? I don't know if it was normal to go and wake up your friends in the middle of the night to ask for bread in the first century, but I'm guessing that regardless of what year it is, this is strange.

 I'm guessing that's the case. I mean, come on, man. You have to have something, even the smallest thing in the pantry. I mean, don't you have a Pop Tart or something in there? It's past bedtime. I mean, can't you open a package of ramen noodles and microwave them for this guy? You have to have something in your house to feed your friend. You can't hold your traveling friend over until morning? You have to have something. And that's the emphasis here in the story. This guy is deficient in his planning. Seriously, why is this guy knocking on the door after everyone's down for the night? Sort something out for yourself and we'll talk in the morning when I have something other than my pajamas on. The field of this story is that the man in bed doesn't owe the friend at the door anything. He is deficient in his planning. This isn't about what he owes him. It's about the man who's at the door. The man wanting bread is persistent, though we read in the story. And so the guy in bed gets up and gives his friend what he needs. And so the words of Jesus that follow this story in verses 9 and 10 are familiar words to us.

 We have not only said these words, we not only read these words, we've sang these words. Jesus tells us to be like the man who comes to the door. Go to God and ask. Seek out God's provisions. Knock and the door will be open to you. For those who ask receive, those who seek will find. Now, these are very bold statements, right? And of course, our twisted and fallen minds think this means that we should get whatever we ask for. If we pray enough, we'll get what we want. But do these verses mean that if I pray for a 55 foot yacht, God owes it to me, that God will provide it for me? Should I pray that a million dollars in gold should be delivered to my door while I'm here preaching and after church, I can go celebrate that there's all this gold at my door? Am I supposed to pray audaciously and expect God to bless me audaciously? Is that what Jesus means? Now, I'm using absurd examples in gold bricks and a yacht to drive home my point. But what does that do? It shows just how contrary our ideas of what we should pray for are compared to what Jesus tells his disciples to pray for, praying for daily bread.

 It was just a handful of verses ago that Jesus told us to pray in such a way that praises God, submits to his will, asks for forgiveness, asks for daily provision, and seeks to live a holy life. That was just a few verses ago. That's the context for these verses. Those are the things that we're to expect God to bless us with. God's answering prayer is not a blank check for us to be prosperous or to expect Him to give what we want. You just can't get that from the context of these verses. It just doesn't work. The big point here is to pray boldly for what you need and expect God to provide it. God is good. He gives provision for his people. Jesus drives home that point in verses 11 through 13. Jesus here tells us that there isn't any father who would give his son a serpent if he asked for a fish or a Scorpion if he asked for an egg. In other words, no father is going to harm their child when they ask for food. This is just basic common sense. Parents love their children, and one of their greatest desires and joys is to be able to provide for them.

 We labor for our families, and we do this to make sure they have what they need. If you and I do this, if this is how we are, how much more does God provide what we need? As I mentioned, we know these truths about God. We know that he gives these good gifts, and yet we struggle to go to him. We struggle to lay our needs at his feet in prayer. But Jesus wants us to know that he provides everything. He lets us know that our heavenly father also gives his people the provision of the Holy Spirit to those who ask. The children of God not only have all their physical needs provided for, but the Holy Spirit provides all that you and I need spiritually as well. This passage is such a blessing to us as the people of God. It would be easy to come to this passage and read through it quickly and think that we need to pray boldly and God will give us whatever we want. We just need to be persistent. Then what happens if that's what we think? When we don't receive it, how do we feel? We perceive that the deficiency is in us.

 We don't have enough faith. We haven't prayed enough. We didn't pray correctly. We didn't use the right words. When we don't understand the text, that can easily happen to us and it can be a struggle for us. But instead, what do we find here in this text? We find that we are to pray for the needs and for the provisions of life and that God is gracious to answer these prayers. Our desire, then, is to desire the things that God gives and to have contentment with these things instead of coveting these things out there that we desire, the things that we don't have. The 10th commandment comes to mind here, doesn't it? That we're to pray, not for those things that we covet, but pray for the things that God in his good grace provides for us. This prayer that Jesus gives us isn't about our ability to manipulate God, but it's about resting in him and trusting him for all that he provides to us. It is with this in mind, then, that we come to our application of this important passage. Now, the first thing that we see in our application is that we need to pray.

 As I've mentioned many times, I think we all struggle to do this at times. Even if you are good at prayer, there are times where you struggle, I'm sure. But we need to do it. We need to stick with it because it's something that God has called us to do. If you struggle with prayer, you struggle with what to say, just say the Lord's prayer. Just say it. It's a daily prayer. Give us our daily bread. If you're struggling to pray, just say that prayer. Stay the course, develop the habit. If nothing else, you can paraphrase your prayers off the Lord's prayer. I'll model that here at the end of the sermon. I will model that for us in case you've never heard that done, I will do that. I haven't planned ahead to do that, so we'll see how it goes. But that is something that you can do. If you're struggling to pray, you can just pray the Lord's prayer or pray according to that. Prayer is vital because it helps us to lay our concerns at God's feet and to stop trying to control things on our own and to trust Him instead of trusting ourselves.

 Because all the stuff that we come up against in life, we can't do it on our own. We need to trust God. That's our second application for today. We know the great truth that he is our gracious, heavenly father. We saw as the passage closed up today that if parents provide the things that children need, how much more will our great Father God provide for us? We can look to the Gospel and we can know that we can trust God to provide this for us because our greatest need was met in the work of Christ for us. He died for us. When we were dead in our sin, he brought us to life. We were spiritually hungry, and he provided the gift of his word and his Spirit to feed us and nourish us. If he gives us these amazing gifts and these extravagant gifts of His salvation, how much more will he provide for us in the midst of the struggles that you and I endure in this life? We see that provision today set before us in the Lord's Supper. God provides us with His good gifts. When we come to those good gifts, we trust that He is going to nourish us as He has promised to do.

 We come to the Lord's table trusting that God's Word and the sacrament will be at work in us because He provides good gifts for His children. Now, as far as these applications go, I acknowledge to you that the words on the screen there that I typed into the computer, Just Pray and Trust God, they were easy to type out and to display up there. That's the easy part. To actually do it is much harder, isn't it? It's an entirely different endeavor to just pray and to trust God. But as I said, we need to pray even when we don't think that we have the words. Praying when we struggle to do so molds us and shapes us to trust more and more in the provisions of God and not trust in ourselves. We have the words of the Lord's prayer to guide us. And we have other scripture to pray to help us to have words when we don't have words of our own. How beautiful is that that God gives us words to pray, his very word, when we are lost for words. Now, I'm going to be really honest with you here and let you know that that is basically a shameless plug for our series coming up this summer.

 Summer in the Psalms. We're going to spend a lot of time this summer embedding ourselves in the Psalms because there is nothing more comforting that when you come to God and you don't have words to say that you're able to say his word, that you're able to say not your words, but his, and so I want to encourage you as you think about prayer today and as we move into the Psalms in June for our summer in the Psalms, to really consider the Psalms and to consider praying those words because there is great contentment to be found in knowing that we're speaking God's words. When I don't have words that I am saying His, that when you and I don't know what to say, we can rest on the word of God to speak into what you and I struggle to say. What a blessing it is that when we don't know what to say, God even provides that. He is a good God. He is a good father who gives all things to his people. Let's close with prayer, trusting in the God who gives good gifts to his children. Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, your name is holy. Your name is above all names. And we pray, oh Lord, that your kingdom would come. We pray that we would submit to your will, that we would look at your world and not desire what we desire, but instead our thoughts would be conformed to your will because your will is perfect. We pray, oh Lord, that you would provide the daily bread that we need. We trust in the provision that you give us. We trust, oh Lord, that you give good gifts to your children. And so we pray that we would not only trust this for the material things that we have, but also that you build up your children in faith through your word and spirit. And we pray audaciously that you would forgive our sins because they are many. And we ask, oh Lord, that you would assure us of the great salvation that we have in Christ, that we would understand that because you have forgiven us, that we should forgive the sins of others. And we pray, oh Lord, that as we lead from this place, we ask that you would not lead us into temptation, that our feet would be on your path, not on those desires that we have that are contrary to your will.

 Bless us, oh Lord, that we might live lives of holiness. And we pray this all in the name of Jesus. Amen.

This message was delivered on May 14, 2023 by Pastor Mark Groen at First Reformed Church in Edgerton, MN. First Reformed is a congregation in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.