Jesus Teaches About Prayer
JESUS TEACHES ABOUT PRAYER
LUKE 11:1-13
There must have been something wonderful about Jesus’ praying, which made his disciples ask this.
Verses 1-4. The Lord was never more simple than when he taught men to pray.
There are those who turn prayer into an exercise in resignation, a form of quietism, a ritual of meditation, or a process of psychological therapy. If Christ is to be heard on the theme, prayer is simply speaking to “our Father in heaven,” and he would never have called God “Father” had he not intended those who heard him to take the word for what it means. God is infinitely wise, infinitely loving, and may be approached as an earthly father may be approached by his anxious child.
A father yearns for some interchange of love from his children, he treasures their complete confidence, he listens with sympathy to their smallest requests; although in his wider wisdom he does not always grant them, he is never deaf to their appeals, unmoved by their fears or untouched by their anxieties, even though he may know that the appeals are unwise, the fears without foundation and the anxieties groundless.
If an earthly father fails to respond thus, to that extent he lacks wisdom or lacks love. God, our Father in heaven, is all-wise, all-loving. If, therefore, we cannot approach him as a child comes to his parent, prayer is not what Christ taught it to be, and if he was wrong, it is futile to seek another basis. The prayer which he gave was not intended to be a hasty gabble of words. It is a series of headings, by which a time of prayer, long or short, may be guided. It calls for pauses, in which the phrase of worship or supplication is related to all life, its varied needs, its personal problems. “Thy will be done” are words not to be uttered without committal, “our daily bread” involves more than mere food, “temptation” and “evil” have their private echoes in our own special circumstances.
11:5-10. By this everyday story, the Lord did not mean that God, like the weary neighbor, could be brought by importunity to a different frame of mind. What Christ meant was that in earthly relationships people are not put off by delay or a first refusal, if their desire is deep enough, or their confidence firm enough in another’s ability to give.
11:11-13. The words reinforce the previous contention that the fatherhood of God is no mockery. All good which comes in the normal, simple relationships of life from a loving parent, comes also from God, only magnified, timely, wisely. If man can be, in love, the author of good, how much more so will the all-loving God give himself. For is not the Holy Spirit God?
Notes 11:2: “hallowed”—treated as holy; “name” includes character. 11:3: “daily” here means for the coming day”—it is a morning prayer. Most of the prayer can be paralleled from rabbinical sources; it is not new words but a new spirit which is all-important. 11:8: “importunity”—“shamelessness” (NEB). 11:10: cf. Matthew 7:7-11; Mark 11:24; John 16:23. 11:13: “who are evil”—sinful by disposition. 11:11-12: the round desert stones of Palestine resembled loaves.