Encouragement To Prayer | Christian Disciplines | Luke 18:1-8

Introduction:

We have spent a few weeks looking at Jesus’ model prayer in the Sermon on the Mount as a pattern for our own praying lives. We have been reminded about the importance of praying to God and that it is also appropriate to pray for ourselves. But knowing the model is not the same thing as executing the discipline. Blueprints are important, but if they are never brought to life by a format and construction crew, then they are nothing more than markings and symbols. 

For many followers of Jesus, this may be precisely what they feel about their own lives of prayer. They have a good idea of what they should look like, but they never get around to having them. If we were to ask for a show of hands to determine who wished they had a better prayer life, the results would reveal that knowing about prayer is not the same thing as experiencing it. 

But prayer does not have to be an uncomfortable subject. For Christians, the mention of it should elicit joy, not discomfort, and especially not guilt. This week, we are going to look at practical encouragements to make regular, meaningful prayer a reality in your life.

I. Prayer Is Expected - Vs. 1

You must think of prayer as Christ’s expectation of his followers. 

We spend much of our time meeting (or attempting to meet) expectations. Some of the expectations on us are impersonal. 

The government expects us to pay taxes. 

Other drivers expect us to use our turn signals. 

Waiters expect us to tip them.

All of these expectations are impersonal. We are doing what is simply demanded or expected of us to do from someone or some thing we have no personal connection to. But there are other kinds of expectations. 

Your spouse or significant other may expect a hand-written card on Valentine’s Day.

Your children may expect you to spend time having fun with them. 

Your friend may expect you to meet for lunch. 

What makes meeting these expectations so much better than the first kind? In this second category, we are meeting expectations of those we love. 

This is precisely how we should think about prayer. Imagine Jesus appearing to you in a vision personally, like he did to John on Patmos, looked at you and told you he wanted you to pray because he loved you. Would that change how you think about prayer? 

You should know that God has already given us this expectation in his Word - and it is personal. It comes from the one who made us, redeemed us, and loves us It comes from the one who made us, redeemed us, and loves us. 

Matthew 6:7 “When ye pray…”

Matthew 6:9 “After this manner therefore pray…”

Luke 11:9 “And I say unto you, ask…seek…knock.”

Colossians 4:2 “Continue in prayer.”

1 Thessalonians 5:17 “Pray without ceasing.”

When Jesus spoke the parable we read at the beginning of this lesson, he contrasted God with an unjust judge. If people like this woman, in desperation, will persistently make requests to impersonal evil rulers who don’t care about them, why would God’s people not want to come to the very opposite kind of being: the King of the universe who loves them?

When our awareness of the greatness of God and the gospel is dim, our prayer lives will be small. The less we think of the nature and character of God, and the less we are reminded of what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross, the less we will want to pray. 

Pray because our loving God expects you to pray.

II. Prayer Is Learned - Vs. 5

The lesson from widow’s persistence is she kept coming back until it was done.

Here is another encouragement to prayer: prayer is learned by practice. The wonderful truth that prayer is something we fumble, something that can be messy in our spiritual lives, something that we don’t always know how to use is an encouraging reality. 

Why? Because prayer is learned, even if your prayer life is weak or nonexistent, you can become a person of prayer. If you are discouraged by the command to pray because you don’t know how to pray well, then you should have hope. Keep doing it.

In Luke 11 we are reminded that the disciples approached Jesus, asking if he would teach them to pray. They had grown up in synagogue and had been following around God in the flesh all this time, and they still didn’t feel like they had a handle on it! Jesus does not berate them in response, but helps them.

So prayer is learned. How can we learn to pray? What are the avenues?  

Learn to pray by praying

If you want to have a prayer life, the best thing you can do is start praying. Reading about prayer, thinking about how to do it, and feeling guilty for not doing it will not get you anywhere. Learn to pray by prayer. 

Foreign language learning works best when you are actually using it - or in a context when you are forced to use it. If you have visited a country where you don’t hear anyone speaking English, it is amazing how quickly you can pick up new words and pronunciation. 

“Reading a book about prayer, listening to lectures and talking about it is very good, but it won’t teach you to pray. You get nothing without exercise, without practice. I might listen for a year to a professor of music playing the most beautiful music, but that won’t teach me to play an instrument.”

Even as you learn to pray, you should not think that God looks at prayer as a competitive sport, looking down on the not-so-good prayers but being more attentive to and more interested in the better ones. God is no respecter of persons. And at the end of the day none of us can approach God perfectly: that is why the Holy Spirit is always helping every Christian pray. 

Read Romans 8:26-27. Even though we don’t always feel like praying, and even when we feel our prayers simply aren’t good enough, God the Spirit is beside us, making prayers of our sorrows and groans and sighs, and keeping us in the presence of God.

Learn to pray by meditating on Scripture

Second, learn to pray by meditating on the Word. As we talked about in our lesson on meditation, thinking seriously about Scripture is the link between Bible intake and prayer output. That is why Psalms, the book of praises, the book that teaches God’s people how to talk to him does not begin with a prayer but begins with an image of a person who meditates on God’s law. Meditation is the doorway into a conversation with God shaped by the words of God. It is through constantly thinking about God’s Word that our distracted lives are gathered into the act of prayer.

Learn to pray by praying with others

One of the ways we learn to talk to God is by talking to him alongside God’s people. In our American Christian culture, prayer, like many of things, has become individualized and privatized. 

But prayer does not have to be done alone. In fact it often should not be done alone. Praying with others that know Scripture well will help you make connections between God’s Word and how to talk to God. Praying with those that know you will help you to see areas in your life you either didn’t know needed God’s intervention or that you had willfully ignored. 

Learn to pray by finding others to pray with you.

III. Prayer Is Answered - Vs. 5 “I will avenge her”

God wants us to pray, and more than that he wants to answer our prayers. 

Read Matthew 7:7-8. 

Sometimes passages like this one make us nervous, because they had been misused. But we should not be afraid to find confidence in these statements from our Lord. We should be encouraged to pray because our Father wants to answer us. 

This promise does not say that God’s answers will be immediately visible or in the way we expected. Nor does the whole of Scripture teach that God is dependent on our every whim. Contrast these two passages. 

Read James 1:5-6.

Read James 4:1-3.

James says about one prayer, “If you ask for this (wisdom) in faith, God will definitely say yes!” He says to the same people about other prayers, “You have asked for this, and God is definitely saying no!”

God does love to answer the prayers of his people, when his people are praying like his people.

Conclusion

Because prayer is expected, will you pray?

Because prayer is learned, will you learn to pray?

Because prayer is answered, will you pray persistently?