Prayer Rooms this Week
- Today – 7:30am | 12 Bassett Street
- Wednesday – Noon | on Zoom
Scripture:
5 Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6 a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ 7 And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity[e] he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.
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. 10 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
11 “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for[f] a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 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!” – Luke 11:5-13
Reflection:
The disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray. In response, he gives them the Lord’s Prayer and then this parable. In this curious and provocative parable, Jesus encodes several key bits of information about the kind of intercessory prayer that moves the heart of God.
Here is the first – prayer that moves the heart of God is provoked by our awareness that we lack something we need. The man in the story is desperate. His is an honor shame culture which prizes hospitality and he is unable to feed the guest in his house. He needs bread…truly needs it…and he knows he doesn’t have it. Prayer that moves God is birthed out of this kind of desperation. It is part of the weather conditions in which the tornado of prayer is formed.
In order to pray, to truly pray – then – we need to learn how to get desperate. One way to do this is to fast – literally, to charge our spiritual/emotional selves with the physical pain of going without food. Another way is to allow God to break our hearts…by putting ourselves in physical or emotional proximity with some need. Another way to get desperate is to get in touch with our holy longings, perhaps those we’ve numbed in some way or another. Those parts of our hearts we’ve shut down or closed off. Another is love. Because even if we have no needs…there are surely those around us who do have needs. Jesus left the comfort of eternal communion with the Trinity in order to enter our world and enter into our need. One way we get desperate is by loving someone else and making their need our need. And this is what the man in the story does.
Prayer Prompts
- Come to Jesus with the following questions:
- Lord, where do I lack? What do I need in my life, home this year that you want me to ask you for?
- What are the holy longings in my heart, my life? For this year? Where have I numbed these?
- Who are you inviting me to love and what do they need?
- Go before the Lord with others in mind, begin asking God to give them what they need and you don’t have.
In Our Time 