Now that John just preached the whole sermon for me and did my intro for me, I told myself I wasn't going to sing, but then I can't help myself and I'm a little bit hoarse in the throat. But I love sing with you guys. So my son is... he's two and a half.
And my mother-in-law is here to see me preach this morning, so I'm excited about that. But my son is two and a half. And he's just at that age where he's starting to talk. He's starting to...
I can have a conversation with him and it's a little bit disjointed, but it's so much fun. And it's sometimes confusing and I don't understand what he's talking about and it's like, yeah, sure okay, whatever, just go play. It's been a little bit of an experiment for my wife and I. We laugh about this all the time because we are attempting to teach him three languages.
My wife is Dutch, so she's speaking Dutch to him. I'm speaking French to him. We lived in France for ten years. And English has been a majority language, so he's learning that as he goes.
And we're kind of really excited right now because we didn't know how he was going to turn out, but he is right now able to communicate with all of our friends and family in their maternal and their native language. And that's super exciting for us. And my mom was here a couple weeks ago and we were sitting at the dinner table and eating and he, without missing a beat, would turn and speak to my wife in Dutch to my mom in English to me in French. But how does a two and a half year old do this?
So it's so instinctive to him. And that's what I want to talk about today. Sometimes I wish my prayer life would be a little more instinctive. Sometimes I wish that I would turn to God and just naturally start talking to him.
But we don't. And as we get into this idea, I want to acknowledge two things. The first thing is that prayer is hard, right? If I were to take a straw poll and say, raise your hand, don't raise your hand.
But if I were and say, whose prayer life is phenomenal, fantastic right now? Probably one or two of us would raise our hands. I wouldn't raise my hand. Because we know that our prayer life should be better.
We don't know that we should talk to God more. And the second thing that I want to acknowledge is just that often our view of prayer is just prayer is wrong. Often we think of prayer. When you talk to me about prayer, I'm imagining a group of people in the back corner of the Menom Hills basement doesn't have a basement.
But if we did, it would be down there in the dead of winter, just interminably boring. But that's not prayer. Prayer is talking to God. But often when you say, Tim, think about prayer, I'm like, boring.
And what I really mean is I don't see that prayer is adding value to my life. We don't see that prayer adds value to our life. And so we go, oh, it's a waste of time. But prayer isn't a waste of time.
So this morning as we look at Luke, chapter 11, as Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, we're looking at a couple of reasons why it's not. We're going to get a second opinion on prayer. Why it's actually a very good use of your time. So here's what Jesus says to his disciples in Luke chapter 11.
He says, when you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins. For we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.
And he said to them, which of you has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, friend, lend me three loaves. For a friend of mine has arrived on a journey and I have nothing to set before him. And the friend will answer from inside his house and say, don't bother me. The door is now shut.
And my children are with me in bed. I can't give you up and give to give you anything. I tell you, says Jesus, 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. And I tell you, ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be open to you.
For everyone who asks, receives and the one who seeks, finds and to the one who knocks, it will be open. Because what father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?
Luke is fascinating in how he arranges the stories in his book. Because sometimes he arranges them slightly out of chronological order to pull out specific themes and ideas. So in Luke chapter 9 verse 51, he has this great verse where he says that Jesus set his face to Jerusalem. And this idea that Jesus is going, okay, I'm going to head back to Jerusalem and I know that I'm going to be arrested and tortured and crucified there by the officials there.
And so from that time in Luke's book, in Luke, Jesus is laser focused on preparing his disciples for life without him. And so now here in Luke 11, Jesus is praying, once again we find him praying, and he comes back and the disciples go, Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us to pray like you pray like that. Because they've seen him pray, they've seen this pattern in his life of constantly praying how it undergirds his entire ministry, of how he always prays right before something really important or miraculous happens.
And they're going, maybe this isn't a waste of time, maybe this isn't just for show, maybe it's not just a ritual, maybe there's actually power in it, maybe there's something to this. And so they say, Lord, teach us to pray. And it sounded actually familiar to them, like it sounds familiar to us because they'd already heard it. They heard it back in the sermon in the Mount which is recorded in Matthew 6.
And so the first thing that I want to pull out from this, this important for us, this important for the disciples, is that prayer isn't a waste of time because it's vital. It's vital. And we know that's true because prayer was vital for Jesus. He was constantly doing it.
He was doing it in a way that it was clear that it was important to his ministry. I can remember growing up and my parents were very strict with us, my sister and I at a table. Some of it was my English heritage and they wanted to teach us manners and some of it was just a good tool for training us as kids. But they were always, they had a certain set of expectations for what we were supposed to do at the table.
But I can also remember my mom always getting after my dad because he wouldn't respect those guidelines. And I laugh about that. But now I'm starting to find that I'm actually the guilty party. That for our kids are at 2 and 1 half we have certain things we're trying to teach them at table.
And I keep doing the things that we said we're not going to do. Like making car noises and whatever else. Do what I say, not what I do. Jesus doesn't have that problem.
He doesn't have that problem. He is preaching what he practices is such a part of him. It's his nature to be like that. He doesn't have that problem that we have that we say one thing and do another.
Let me just show you for a second. I'm going to geek out on you a little bit and just show you why that's such a part of his nature. We jump forward to the gospel of John 1 verse 1. He writes this.
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. John's talking about Jesus. Jesus is the word.
But then he continues. He says all things were made through him and without him not anything was made that was made. So everything that has ever existed, everything that will ever exist was made by Jesus. The word in action.
If we go back to Genesis 1 we see that again. God says let there be light, let there be land, let there be water and then it was. The author of Genesis isn't saying, hey, here's what God did. He announced that he was going to do it.
And then he went and did it. He's very words engendered action. There's no distinction between for God, between what he says and what he does, what he knows and what he does. So what would that look like for us if we were a little bit more like Jesus?
If we were a little more congruent in our knowing or our saying and our doing. What would that look like? What would it look like if what we say we believe in our theology and in our evangelism that God wants a relationship with us? What would it look like if that's what we actually did?
If that's how we actually lived. And as I watch Jesus in this passage, I'm shuffling back and forth. As I watch Jesus in this passage, I notice that he's praying. He teaches the disciples to pray and he prays himself.
And I think for us, the place to start is to pray. Prayer is the place where our knowing or what we say we know and what we do gets worked out. Why is that true? Let's do a little thought experiment for a second.
Imagine that God exists, just imagine. Imagine that he is personal and that he wants a relationship with you. So what's the most logical thing to do based on those two criteria, that knowledge? Would it be to give him lots of gifts?
Would it be to find out what his values are and then try to live your life according to those values? Would it be to accomplish lots of things for him? Well, maybe those are all good things. But based on the fact that he's personal and he wants a relationship with you, I think that the most logical first step is to start talking to him and expecting him to talk back.
You don't talk at God. You talk with him. Just like you don't talk at your best friend. And that's because that's all prayer is at the end of the day in a very simple way.
Prayer is just talking with God. It's talking to him like you would talk to a close friend. As I was thinking about this, if prayer is talking with God, you should expect there to be some similarity between how you talk to your best friend and how you talk to God. The patterns, the rhythms, the frequency.
There should be some similarity to that because he's a person. You talk to him like he's a person. Which means on some level that prayer will look a little different for each one of us. But there's more.
Imagine that you start talking to God. Imagine that you start coming to him with all of those things. Talking to him like you talk to your best friend, sharing all those things that frustrate you. You don't understand.
And as you talk to him, this crazy thing happens. All of a sudden in your life, you notice that you actually start caring and doing and acting the way you say you want to care and act and think in your prayer. And so just like Jesus prayer helps you to work out your praying and you're doing. Just like Walgreens is at the corner of happy and healthy, prayer is at the corner of knowing and doing.
Something this week that took me the heart of why this knowing and doing and working that out and prayer how it ties it together, why it's so important. Why it's so vital for us. Back in the Middle Ages, there's a guy called Frederick II. In about 1220, he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor.
He was passionate about the arts and the sciences. And he did an experiment. He wanted to find out what is our natural language. And so to do that, he took babies away from their birth mothers and gave them two rules.
He said, as the wet nurse, you can't talk to the baby. You can't talk when you're around them. And you can't give them any nonverbal communication. You can't rub their backs.
You can't. There's no communication. I want to see if they develop a language by themselves in a vacuum. The historian, he labored in vain.
He never got any results from it because all of the infants died. They all died because they couldn't survive without communication. The wet nurses were allowed to bathe them and nurse them. They weren't allowed to do any communication of any kind.
They all died. I mean, I had a six-month daughter. Six-month-year-old daughter. My wife and I refused all communication with her.
She's going to die, even just basic padding on the back. And we know that's true. And I know that's true. The children need to be communicated to by their parents.
And yet, we constantly refuse to communicate with our father in heaven. And it's killing our souls. Your soul is slowly shrinking and shriveling inside you. My personal experience, I was convicted about this a couple months ago.
I read a book on prayer. And one of my biggest excuses for not praying, in fact, we're not doing a lot of things. I'm too busy. I'm too busy.
I'm too much to do. I hear that. I say it all the time. I hear you guys say it all the time.
And we are. We're so busy. And this quote that I read from author Don Carson says this. He says, it matters little whether you are the mother of active children who drain away your energy.
An important executive in a major multinational corporation. A graduate student cramming for impending comprehensives. A plumber working overtime to put your children through college or a pastor of a large church putting in 90-hour weeks. At the end of the day, if you're too busy to pray, you're too busy.
And then I answered a question in my mind of how do I actually say I'm too busy. How do I actually know? If I'm too busy to pray, I'm too busy. I have to cut something.
I've got to make time for that life-giving activity of talking to my father. The next thing that Jesus teaches us through this passage and Luke is that prayer isn't a waste of time because it's intimate. And explain what that looks like. Jesus paints a picture to his disciples.
He tells them a parable, a story with a lesson of what it looks like. He gives it color and shape and detail. What does it look like? That intimate relationship looks exactly like a child, a father-child relationship.
And this is a huge revelation of the New Testament that God has revealed himself and he's like a father. Here's what first John 3-1 says. He says, see what great love the father has lavished upon us. That we should be called children of God and that is what we are.
He's lavished his love. He's given graciously and generously and freely to us by making us part of his family. And that means that we can have a relationship with him. You know, just think about the people you're closest to for a second.
Think about that for two seconds. That person that comes to mind. Is that relationship a waste of time, that most intimate relationship? Prayer isn't a waste of time because it's intimate.
And this idea of intimacy revolves around two things. Dependence and confidence. Reality with God looks like child dependence on their father. This model for prayer that Jesus gives us, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.
It's the Matthew version. But this is the idea of all encompassing dependency on Christ. Every one of those requests, I'm not going to go into them. That's a whole other sermon.
But every one of those requests is an area of your life. There's no compartmentalization in your relationship with God. There's no saying, oh, here's what I'm going to depend on God for. And here's what I can do myself.
No, praying this prayer, this model for prayer is saying, when you pray, you're saying, God, I know that in every area of my life, if you're not in it, it's going to go pear-shaped. It's going to go wrong. So Jesus tells a story of what it looks like. He starts with this parable about what God is not like.
He actually tells two parables. One, the first about what God is not like, and the second about what he is like. So Jesus says that there's this guy. He comes to your house in the middle of the night.
The doctor in the door and says, hey, I'm here. You go, uh-oh, I don't have anything to give this guy to eat. But in that culture, you have to know that to turn that guy away to not feed him would have been unthinkable. You would culturally unacceptable.
So he goes, why am I going to? I'm going to go to my friend's house. And I'm going to ask him, if he knocks on his friend's house, his neighbor, and he says, hey, I got this guy, he just showed up at my house. I got to give him some food.
I got to feed him. And the neighbor's already in bed. Now, if you know anything about Palestinian homes, everybody sleeps in the same room. It would have been the guy and his wife and his eight kids.
So he's going, look, don't wake me up. If I get up, I'm going to wake everybody else up. I'm already in bed. Leave me alone.
But Jesus says, even though he won't get up on the basis of friendship, he will get up on the basis of what he says this impudence, the shameless confidence. He's going to get up and help his friend reluctantly because he's afraid that if he doesn't words get out and then he won't, he'll be embarrassed that he's shamed in society. And so even though he won't do it because of their friendship, he will reluctantly get up because of social pressure and help his friend. And Jesus says, that's what God is not like.
God is not a reluctant friend. God wants you to keep coming back to him and asking over and over and over and over again, like a two and a half year old who keeps asking the same thing over and over and over and over. That childish confidence that has no boundaries. You don't have boundaries with God.
And he's not going to get angry. You're not going to lose his patience. He wants you to keep coming back to him with the confidence. That's what he's not like.
And then he tells a follow-up. And he says, here's what God is like. And so he tells a story. I love this story.
He says, who of you, as in none of you is crazy enough to do this. None of you would actually do this. But who of you, if your son asks you for a fish, is going to give him a servant. Or who of you, if your son asks you for an egg, is going to give him a scorpion.
If then you in your, because you were evil and you're sinning, you're imperfection, if you were able to enact basic kindnesses towards your children, how much more is God who is perfect? The perfect father going to give you the things you ask for. Give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him. Can you, my son, I love talking about my son.
I swore I would never be like the guy who was just like, like, told me I'm like that. I guess I have to make a most of it. Every morning he wakes up and he asks for porridge. He loves porridge.
He doesn't want porridges. John said that Americans don't want porridges. Goldilocks. Goldilocks.
He wakes up and says, I'm bad. He goes, porridge. So I take him out to the kitchen and I make a porridge for him, send him in his chair. He goes, blueberries.
So I get some blueberries out and put him in there and start up. And he goes, honey. So I put some honey and start up and he gobbles it all down every morning. Every morning he loves that stuff.
Can you imagine, it's almost nonsense. If you imagine the twisted logic to go, my son is asking for porridge. Therefore I'm going to give him a scorpion. How do you even get there?
And so if we're able to do those basic things of, my son is asking me for porridge. So I'm going to give him some porridge because he needs to eat. If we are capable of doing that in our imperfection as parents, as fathers, how much more is God going to give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? Shouldn't that change?
Right? If God is a father, if he's a good father, shouldn't that change how we approach him? Shouldn't that change how often we approach him? And finally, prayer is not a waste of time because it's vital, because it's intimate.
It's asking your father who loves you to move on your behalf, to spending time with your dad, with that close friend of that father. And finally it's not a waste of time because it's hard. What that's in for a minute. I've been learning in the last couple of years the things that are most valuable to me are actually the things that are hard.
That's where I learn the most. Prayer is not a waste of time because it's hard. Jesus tells his disciples, ask and it will be given, seek and you will find knock and it will be open to you. Those verbs ask, seek, knock, knock.
Those are continuous verbs. It's actually asking, seeking, knocking. It's that continue, that persevering in prayer, that keep coming back. It's that child is tied into that idea of dependence that our children have.
We keep asking and keep asking and keep asking until he answers or till we feel like we're not supposed to pray anymore. There's a really great picture of the hardness of prayer in Genesis 32. And it says, it's sort of Jacob when he wrestles with the angel. It says, the same night he arose and took his two wives.
That's Jacob, took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven children and sent them across to the other side of the river. He took them and sent them all across. Everything else he had, everything he had was over on the other side. And he was alone on the other side of the river by himself.
And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket and Jacob's hip was put out of point, out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, let me go for the day has broken. But Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you bless me.
And he said to him, what is your name? And he said, Jacob. Then he said, your name shall no longer be Jacob, Israel, be able to be driven with God and with men and have prevailed. That's the picture of wrestling with God in prayer.
Lord, I'm not going to let you go until you bless me. I'm not going to let you. I'm going to keep wrestling with you in this. I can remember being fifteen or sixteen and I would play badminton which is one of my best friends.
Not most mainly sport I know. But we would go at it for hours. I mean, summer night that was we would go back and forth. It would be his game point and then my game point and then his game point.
And we were evenly matched. And so it went on and on and on. That's the picture here. They were evenly matched.
But most of us, and again, I'm including myself here, we don't want the relationship because relationship is hard. We don't approach God with everything that's in our hearts and our minds because we don't have to wrestle with questions like, God, why aren't you doing what I asked you to do? You know, we really want him to act more like a background app that's on our phones. We don't have to think about.
We're like a distant deity that you can't really know. We don't want a life of daily maintenance. Now, all that being said, I'm always playing devil's advocate in my head as I'm thinking through these things. Okay, Jesus said ask and you will receive, seek and you will find.
But what happens when I don't, when I'm not given, what happens when I don't find, what happens when the door isn't opened? That sounds great. So as I was working through that, I found this phenomenal verse in I John 514. And it has this promise.
And it says, this is the confidence that we have toward him. That if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us and whatever we ask, we know that we have the request that we have asked of him. The Apostle John would argue that if we ask according to God's will, he will answer our requests.
Because right, if God's will is completely perfect and good and loving, what makes sense is if we're asking in line with that, then he'll actually answer. To put it another way, God's ultimate will for you and I is that we would be conformed to the image of Christ. That's the language of Romans. We would be conformed to the image of people.
When people look at us, we look so much like Jesus that they see him instead of us. So as your prayer begins to flow from that place, he's going to, you will have your request is what John would say. Now, I go, okay, that's the first part of the answer. But that's still, if you're like me, you're picking out all of the exceptions.
Okay, that's kind of satisfactory. But then there's a second part. So what about the second part? What about that bomb that went off in Manchester?
What about those two and three year old, however the little kids who were killed? What about the kids who are born alcoholic on the Pine Ridge Run Indian reservation and then trying, at 15 or 16, trying to commit suicide? What about them? God, why aren't you doing anything about them?
How could a perfect right, how could a perfect and loving God allow those things to happen? And honestly, I'm not sure I have a completely thought out answer for you there. I mean, they're out there. You can go Google them.
Lots of very smart intelligent people have put out those answers. And for me, whenever I read those, they always run up against a problem, a great unknown that we don't know the mind of God. And here's where we come full circle. Here's my answer from a different perspective for you.
It's that maybe this is what relationship looks like. And we're coming back full circle. Maybe God wants you to keep talking to him about those things that you don't understand. Right?
That's relationship. And as you talk to him and as you say, God, why aren't you doing anything about this? I care about this. Guess what?
He starts working in your life and all of a sudden you start really caring about it and then you go out to Pine Ridge because you said you cared about it to God and he changed your heart and then you really started caring about it. And I think in the context of this passage of prayer, that is, to me, that's the answer to go, yeah. Okay, it's relationship. Relationship is hard.
I got to keep going back to God with those questions because we can't ultimately know them. I've read all the answers. Maybe you have to. Just as a last aside before I close, Luke says, Jesus says through Luke, that the best gift he could give us is the Holy Spirit, which is hard for me because sometimes I end up praying for, well, God, I'd like a promotion.
Or a new car or, you know, we pray for those things. Sometimes we even pray a little more spiritually. We say, God, I just want you to fix my marriage. I just want you to bring my kids back.
But Jesus says, the best gift he could give you is the Holy Spirit. And so my challenge in some ways is how many of us are actually spending time in prayer asking God, saying, Lord, I need your spirit to be able to live through this situation. How many of us are praying for his spirit to empower us to live out our lives like Jesus? So as the band comes up, I'm not back there to get them, so.
As the band comes up, I don't want to minimize the hardness of prayer. It's real. There's tension there. There's mystery.
There's unknown. It's hard. It's hard for me. I can't tell you how many times I've stopped and started and stopped again.
I got a church and heard somebody preach about prayer or read a book about prayer and it was inspiring and then I start praying and then it's boring and I stop again. I guess my challenge and my encouragement to you is this. My hope is that when you hear that voice in your head that says, prayer is a waste of time. You'll be encouraged to persevere in it because you know its benefits.
You'll know its vitality and its intimacy and it's hard this. Maybe for those of you who are going, I've never prayed a day in my life. Maybe you would sit down and have that first conversation with God today. But you who are like me who struggle in it and stop and start all the time, you'll be encouraged to pray through it.
I think that that emptiness that you feel, that hunger that you start to feel is a first step. It's an important first step, but you have to push through it. You need to encourage each other to push through it. That's why we gather to encourage each other.
Finally those of you, I know that there are those of you who are faithful in prayer and I want to say thank you. This church needs people like you. If you want a really simple application, I told this to my small group of boys of the day, set your alarm two minutes early. I pray for two minutes.
Two minutes. Start with something attainable, achievable. If you're doing the reading through Luke with us, there's a prayer at the end. Use that as a jumping off point and pray for two minutes after that.
Set your alarm. It's vital to your soul. Your soul is dying if you are not communicating with your heavenly Father. Prayer can change the world.
I really truly believe that. And if you dare to try it, it might change you. This week, how is your prayer life going to look different?