Prayerful Audacity

Teach Us to Pray

The text we just read, as you could probably figure out on your own, is where we get the Lord’s Prayer from. Here at Edgewater, and in most Lutheran churches across the country, we say it every week. Jesus provides this prayer in response to the disciples’ asking Him how they should pray. But that isn’t the end of His instruction on prayer in this conversation. He goes on to provide two analogies to help us understand how God receives and responds to prayer, and I’d like to dive into these three different parts of Jesus’ answer.

The Archetype

Archetype is a term that comes up in literature, and in Biblical interpretation a fair bit. It can mean a very typical example of a certain person or thing, an original that has been imitated, or a recurrent symbol or motif in literature. For example, 10 Things I Hate About You is an archetype of a chick-flick - it’s just a great example of what a chick-flick is. Or Jason Bourne is an archetype for action movies - it’s a very typical example of an action movie. And when the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, He responds by giving them an archetype for prayer, a very typical example for His disciples, for us, to imitate. He says “Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.” To simplify that a little bit, Jesus is praising God by calling His name holy and expressing His desire for God’s kingdom. Jesus then goes on to say “give us each day our daily bread,” and this can be understood as asking God for everything we need in our day - food, shelter, the Lakers to keep winning. Then Jesus says “forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us, and lead us not into temptation.” Maybe the most important part of the prayer, asking for God to forgive us. And you might’ve noticed “wait, there’s something missing here?” Maybe you’re asking “did we add something to the Lord’s Prayer? Can we do that?” And the answer is maybe and yes. Not to get too deep into it, but there are a bunch of manuscripts of the Bible - like thousands, and these manuscripts have slight variations - like saying Christ Jesus instead of Lord Jesus Christ. And a lot of those manuscripts say “for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen.” So it’s entirely possible that those lines of gratitude and praise were included in the original, but the people who assembled all those pieces based on the age, location, and condition of different manuscripts, decided it was more likely that the original conversation didn’t include those lines. What that means is it could’ve been part of Jesus’ original answer, or it was just a practice in the early church that got recorded as people were making copies of the Gospels. In either case, it’s a faithful and worthwhile addition.

So if we look at this prayer as the example, how do we follow that example? Well, looking at it we can see four different parts of the prayer that can guide our own prayers. Jesus’ prayer praises God, asks for forgiveness, requests things from God, and thanks God for who He is. Conveniently enough, that gives us an acronym that can be easy enough to remember - P.A.R.T. When you pray, start by praising God for who He is and how incredible He is, then we ask for forgiveness for our sins - both the ones we don’t know about and especially the ones we do, then we ask God for the things we need, the things we want, and for the people around us, finally we thank God for everything He has done for us. And to help you remember that, I brought these reminder bracelets that say P.A.R.T. on them. I want to challenge you to put it on before you leave, and you’ll notice that these are the annoying ones that you have to put on to enter some places and events, you may also notice that it’s in a attention grabbing color. Until you reach your limit and have to cut it off, every time the color gets your attention or the bracelet irritates you - take a couple minutes to do your P.A.R.T. and pray. And for anyone who might be listening to this sermon afterward - yes, I have extra bracelets for you if you want one.

The Audacity

So Jesus starts answering by providing an example for how to pray, an example that we can follow, but He doesn’t stop His explanation there. He goes on to tell about a man who knocked on his friend’s door in the middle of the night Jesus says “I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs.”

Maybe you’ve had this life experience, maybe you haven’t, but sometimes all it takes is the audacity to ask. A wise man once told me “the answer is already no.” If you don’t ask, the answer is no, so you don’t really have anything to lose by asking. There was a time in my life where I was asking a friend for a letter of recommendation for a lease, and do you think I wrote him a professional email saying “To Whom it May Concern, I would like to formally request a reference?” No! I found the exact text which said “Can I get your email and address for a lease reference?” I didn’t even punctuate it correctly. Did he write me the reference, yeah he did. And I love Jon Martz to death, but God is a better listener and a better friend than Jon. Sometimes when people think about prayer, they’re worried about it not sounding good enough. I’ve had people tell me, “I don’t sound as good” and “I don’t have the right words.” God here is promising to listen anyway, even if you’re rudely banging on the door in the middle of the night. I think that sometimes when our prayers aren’t answered the way we want, people will sometimes respond saying “maybe you didn’t pray hard enough” or “you need to be more sincere” or something else to say that your prayer wasn’t good enough. It’s not the quality of our prayer or even the strength of our faith that accomplishes anything, it’s only God and the fact that He loves us enough to listen to us and respond in a way that is best - even if that’s not the answer we’re looking for. Maybe you aren’t comfortable praying in public, I can understand that, but don’t ever let me hear you say that your prayers aren’t good enough for God to hear you, don’t ever let me hear you say that you can’t pray. Even if your words are rough, even if you aren’t praying ‘fervently,’ no matter the quality of your prayer God promises to hear you and answer you.

Good Gifts

And we shouldn’t ever be afraid of how God is going to respond to us. He’s our loving God, not a vindictive genie. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard myths or stories about a genie. The genie grants you your wish, but always misinterprets it or grants the wish in the worst way possible. Like maybe you wish to be able to fly, so the genie gives you a wing-suit and drops you in the stratosphere. Or maybe you’ve heard something like this, “be careful what you pray for, if you pray for patience God might just give you experiences to test your patience.” God’s not some vindictive genie waiting to twist our hopes and prayers against us. Jesus’ last lesson about prayer is “if you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”

Think about your own experiences giving gifts to people. You go to the store or you start browsing online looking for the perfect gift - but that is a really hard task sometimes. And, if we’re being honest, I’d guess that a lot of times we have to settle for a gift that’s less than perfect - whether that’s for a spouse, for a kid, for a friend, or anything else. But how often do we really experience critical failure? How often do you get something for someone after really trying to get a perfect gift, and it ends up deeply offending them or hurting them? Maybe I’m giving y’all too much credit, but I don’t think that many of you have gotten a gift for someone close to you and oops, ruined their lives. And again, God is a much better gift giver than you. We don’t have to be afraid that He is going to twist our prayers, because He has already given us the greatest gift - the gift of faith. Faith in His Son, faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, faith in the forgiveness He offers, faith in the eternal paradise He promises for us, and faith that He promises to hear our prayers and answer in a way that is best. Amen.