What He Said About Prayer Series

Series: What He Said

Title: What He Said About Prayer

Text: Luke 18:1-8

Title: What He Said About Prayer

Text: Luke 18:1-8

Thesis: Intercessory prayer is an expression of faith in which we ask God to intervene in a circumstance in our life with the understanding that God in His perfect will and wisdom may answer or delay or deny our request.

Introduction:

Larry Crabb wrote in his book, Great Expectations, When I was 10, I first heard Matthew 21:22, where Jesus, who never lies, said, "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer." It was the "whatever" model of prayer, ask for whatever you want, and it's yours.

I remember running outside, standing on our driveway, closing my eyes real tight, and praying: God, I want to fly like Superman. And I believe you can do it. So I'll jump, and you take it from there.

I jumped four times—and each time landed half a second later and half a foot farther down the driveway. I had believed and I had asked, just like Jesus said. But I didn't receive. Thus began my 50-year journey of confusion about prayer. (Larry Crabb, "Great Expectations," Pray! magazine (November/December 2006), p. 34)

If we are to understand that persistence is the key to answered prayer, ten year old Larry Crabb should have kept on praying for the ability to fly and should have remained in his driveway jumping up into the air until God caved and granted him the ability to fly.

Who among us this morning has not asked God for something and did not get it or to do something that did not come about? Who among us has not experienced the disappointment of unanswered prayer?

Of course we can discount a childhood prayer to fly as a silly thing to ask of God but what about the job that did not come through or the illness that was not healed or the marriage that failed or the miraculous financial gift that did not arrive in the mail just in time to pay the mortgage?

This morning I will be talking about what Jesus said about prayer from two texts in which Jesus specifically teaches about the subject of prayer. The texts are Luke 18:1-8 and Luke 11:5-10. The texts are very similar as we will soon see.

In Luke 18:1 the text begins, One day Jesus told his disciples a story to show them they should always pray and never give up. And then he began to tell the story, “There was a judge…”

In Luke 11 Jesus’ disciples had come to him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” That is the text in which Jesus proceeded to teach them how to pray by modeling The Lord’s Prayer in verses 2-4. Then in Luke 11:5 it says, Then, teaching them more about prayer he told this story: “Suppose you went to a friend’s house at midnight…”

Both of the stories Jesus told are stories in which there is someone who has something and someone who needs something and of how the person who needs something persists until they get what they want from the person who has what they need.

Seemingly the point Jesus is making is that we should pray and pray and pray and pray and never give up praying until we get what we want.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the text and see if we can get some clarity into what Jesus has to say about prayer.

Can we say unequivocally that Persistence in Prayer Moves the Heart and Hand of God? In other words, is it persistence that moves the hand of heart and hand of God and if we do not persist, i.e., if we do not ask and ask and ask and ask and ask will God not answer our prayers?

I. Does Persistence Move the Heart and Hand of God?

Jesus told his disciples a story to show them they should always pray and never give up. Luke 18:1

A. The Story of the Persistent Widow, Luke 18:2-5

“There was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about people. A widow came to him repeatedly saying, ‘Give me justice in this dispute with my enemy.’ The judge ignored her for a while, but finally he said to himself, ‘I don’t fear God or care about people, but this woman is driving me crazy. I am going to see that she gets justice because she is wearing me out with her constant requests!’” Luke 18:2-5

The judge in our story has absolutely no moral compass. He doesn’t give a rip about God or what God thinks and he cares even less about people. The widow, who is among the least influential in the social order, has absolutely no clout with this judge. She has no political status. She has no socio-economic status. She brings no hope of bribery to influence his decision. She is nothing but a nuisance. He dismisses her repeatedly but she repeatedly reappears in his court pleading her case.