22. Who is Jesus?
January 30th, 2010
The Lord’s Prayer
We are in Luke 11:1 this morning. As we investigate the life of Jesus our goal is to learn how to be like Him. We have seen Jesus traveling around teaching, healing people, casting demons, and performing various other miracles. That is not all Jesus has been doing. Jesus didn’t just spend time with people. He spent time with God. Jesus spent a lot of time in prayer. He would pray during His teaching and people got to witness how Jesus communicated to God. There is just something about the way that Jesus prays that cannot be ignored. He has this dynamic intimacy with God and His prayers are powerful.
When these crowds see how well Jesus communicates with God they want to learn how to do that. So they ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. This is not the first time this request has been made. Jesus taught about prayer in when He was in Galilee now He is in Judea. He has a new audience who are wrestling with the same issue.
We often struggle with prayer. We don’t always get it, we don’t know if we are doing it right. A lot of us have no idea how to pray. We close our eyes and babble something. We can repeat words we have heard in church but we don’t really know how to pray to God from our hearts. We struggle with prayer. The people in Jesus day did too. We are not born knowing how to pray. Prayer is a skill that has to be learned over time. It doesn’t come naturally and we never stop learning. It’s like married couples. You don’t always know how to communicate things but as you spend more time together and get closer to each other you learn. You are never finished though. So if you don’t feel comfortable or don’t know if you are doing it right don’t be embarrassed. No one prays as well or as often as they should. Learning to pray like Jesus is a process, don’t feel guilty that you don’t instinctively know how, but let’s take this opportunity to learn and to grow together so as a community our prayers will be more like the prayers of Jesus.
Lk 11:1 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.”
This whole conversation is sparked by the fact that Jesus is praying. Step one: do it. Praying like communication has to start somewhere. It may be weird and uncomfortable at first like talking to someone you are interested in for the first time: “So…God…you come here often? What are your likes, your dislikes? Tell me your life story.” Well that could take awhile. Prayer is not always smooth and eloquent, just real.
When people see Jesus pray they are inspired to learn how to do it the way He does. If you want to be great at something, you find someone who is great at it, you have them teach you, and you practice a lot. It was not uncommon for rabbi’s to teach their students to pray by sharing with them their own methods and focuses. John the Baptist did this for his followers and now the crowds are asking Jesus to do the same. His prayers are powerful so people want to learn to pray from the master.
Jesus models prayer for His disciples. One of the best ways to learn to pray is to listen to other people pray. When I was growing up we prayed every night. I didn’t really understand why or what I was supposed to be doing. I didn’t know how to pray from my heart. My parents prayed and then my sister and I would and in hearing them pray we would imitate their prayers and then eventually we learned to pray on our own. If you have kids or grandkids, sit down with them and pray so that they can learn how to pray by following your example.
One key aspect to Jesus prayers is that they were reflective of a greater intimacy with God than any other prayer these people would have heard. The Jews did think of God like a Father but they would rarely address Him as ‘Abba. ’ Abba is a term of endearment used within the family circle which means something between Father and Daddy. It simultaneously communicates reverence and intimacy. Jesus is opening up a whole new level of intimacy in which people can approach God not just as a powerful God and king but as a personal Father. For some of us this image has been ruined by our earthy fathers. Some of you have grown up with harsh, cruel, abusive, or just cowardly, and negligent fathers and so this doesn’t resonate with you the way it should.
When Jesus talks of God as a Father He is not talking about the guy who beats his kids, who yells at them, who discourages them with his critical attitude, or even who ignores them. Jesus is talking about God as Father setting and example of what all father’s should be. Kind, loving, caring, supportive, encouraging, God is a protector, and a provider and He loves us in a way that some of us because of our family life will never really understand. All I can tell you is this: God’s love for you is good. If your father wasn’t good, then that is not the connection Jesus is referring to. We all have dad’s but you have to earn the right to be a father. Guys, be fathers to your kids. When they are with you they need to feel safe, protected, provided for, and loved. If your kids don’t get that from you, if they don’t know that you would sacrifice anything just to help them then you are not doing your job right.
Lk 11:2 He said to them, “When you pray, say: “ ‘Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Lk 11:3 Give us each day our daily bread. Lk 11:4 Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.’ ”
Jesus teaches us how to pray. These verses are very similar to what Jesus says in the sermon on the mount in Matthew 6. You start with adoration. Jesus prayer begins with a personal address to God connecting to Him like a Son connects to His Father. The Jews had so much reverence for God that they viewed Him as being removed and untouchable. So they lost connection to God in their prayers. On the other hand some of our prayers get a little too comfortable where we treat Jesus more like a buddy or a cosmic Santa Claus and we lose sight of the Holiness of God. Jesus prayer manages to avoid both of these errors. He shows us how to have intimacy with God without losing sight of His Holiness. So prayer starts off by recognizing who God is in connection to us.
The next step is submission which is the act of recognizing who we are in connection to God. There is a submissive declaration for the desire for God’s reign to come and God’s way to be done. This is expressing the desire for God’s will, way, plan, and purpose to be done above our own. It is the laying down of our wants for the sake of what God wants by reminding ourselves that we need to want what God wants. Before we can start confessing and asking God for stuff we need to recognize who He is. We cannot pray to our full potential unless we understand who it is we are praying to.
Then comes the request. At this time men were paid daily and usually just enough to get food for their family for the daily. So asking for daily bread would be asking for their needs to be met one day at a time. This is an area we often do not understand. They were relying on God for their daily provision which is hard for us to do with a freezer full of food that will last us a month. The mere existence of Sam’s club makes it difficult for us to understand what this would have been like. Our affluence in the physical realm has made it easy to forget that we need God to provide.
Ultimately the prayer concludes with a request for forgiveness. Every other part of this prayer is exhortation. This part is contingent. The request we make for forgiveness is directly connected to the forgiveness that we offer. This is the law of retribution: that we are forgiven to the extent that we forgive others. What we have done to God is far worse than what anyone else has done to us. Therefore it is unreasonable to think that God will forgive us the great sin we have committed against Him when we fail to forgive the little sin our fellow man commits against us.
Lk 11:5 Then he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, Lk 11:6 because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.’ Lk 11:7 “Then the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ Lk 11:8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.
We don’t typically show up at people’s houses in the middle of the night. We might consider that to be rude if it was unplanned. We also don’t live in desert where we have to travel on foot in which case you might intentionally plan to travel at night because it is cooler. If you were traveling a long distance on foot it is also much harder to plan a specific arrival time. Meaning that this sort of situation might be unavoidable.
Palestinian families would often sleep together in the same room on a single mat. So if you went to wake up your neighbor to ask for bread you were not just waking him up, you were waking up the whole family. We might be pretty upset if our neighbor woke us up in the middle of the night to ask for bread. We’d be like dude, do I look like a Super Wal-Mart to you? Go to the store. In Palestine it was part of their culture that visitors were taken care of not by a single family but by the whole community. So this neighbor was within his right to ask for some help.
While this neighbor may not like. If you wake them up in the middle of the night they will give you bread to get you to go away. Here take the bread and leave me alone. Sometimes it pays to be neighbors with the grumpier old men. This is not to say that we can manipulate God into doing our bidding by being bold and persistent with our requests. You cant annoy God into doing things for you. This shows us that if even a grumpy old neighbor will give into your bold request how much more will a good and loving God give gifts to His children?
Lk 11:9 “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. Lk 11:10 For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Lk 11:11 “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Lk 11:12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? Lk 11:13 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!”
So your kids come down for breakfast in the morning and ask for an egg. Would any of you give them a scorpion? Instead of breakfast you get poisonous bug with a stinger and claws. Who loves you? Honestly, I don’t know what Jesus is getting at here because my dad is an entomologist and he would totally do that. We had a pet scorpion. He put a tarantula next to my bed in a glass container so I would freak out when I woke up. Jesus point is: if evil people can take of their kids and support each other how much more do you think the loving God who has made us His children will take care of and support you? God is not some being in the sky beyond our reach. He hears our prayers and like a Father is excited to give us gifts.
James 4:2 tells us that God reserves some gifts for those who pray. There are things God wishes to give us that if we do not ask Him for we will not get. In addition to getting good gifts, Luke notes God will give us the Holy Spirit which is the greatest gift of all. So we can have the confidence to ask because God is sure to give us what we need.
Prayer doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Prayer is the time we set aside to just be with our Father. We start off by recognizing who He is, then who we are to Him. If we have needs we ask for them knowing that our Father is more than just a dad. He loves us so much that He sent His only Son to die so that we might have life. God loves you in a way that no one else ever has or ever will. Nothing can change that. Prayer is our time with our Father, and thanks to the grace of God we get come to Him as His children.
