Ask and You Shall Receive
Luke 11:1-13
July 28, 2019
Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff
Whenever I hear the passage we just read, especially the part about “Ask, and it will be given to you,” a song starts running through my head. It goes like this: “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz….” Let’s listen to Janis sing it! [Mercedes Benz]
I love that song, don’t you? It’s such an outrageous parody of something I think just about every person has done at some point in his or her life, whether or not they actually believe in God. When we desperately want something, we find ourselves exclaiming, “Please God! Let me pass this test!” “Let me not get a speeding ticket!” “Let the results come back negative!” Sometimes we try to sweeten the deal by offering something back to God. “If you let me get away with this just one time, I’ll never do it again!”
The practice of requesting things from God may be universal, but so is the experience of having that request go unanswered, or at least not answered in the affirmative. One of the things we can safely say for sure about prayer is that there is not a clear relationship between input and output. Prayer is not a mechanical process. It is not like putting a quarter in a gumball machine. We can't always get what we want (and no, we're not going to sing that song too!).
So when Jesus’ disciples ask him how they should pray, why does he tell them to make requests to God? This is the opposite advice from a lot of directions we hear nowadays from teachers who have been shaped by meditation or contemplative practice. Those teachers talk about letting go of desire, releasing the thoughts that come into our heads about everything we want so that we can move to a more reflective, a more receptive place in prayer. But not Jesus. He even puts words to our desires: give us food, forgive the things we’ve done wrong, keep us safe. But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to say, “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” Why would he say such a thing? Isn’t he setting his disciples up for disappointment? Isn’t he setting them up for a lifetime of unanswered prayers?
It’s a simple question to ask, but I think the answer is a bit complex because prayer is both expressive and formative, and Jesus is speaking about prayer on both of those levels.
The hymn we just sung, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus", talks about the expressive quality of prayer--whatever you are feeling, the song says, you can "take it to the Lord in prayer". When we do that, when we pray whatever is on our hearts, we build our sense of friendship with God. Think about it: in human relationships, we tend to feel closer to people when we are able to express ourselves freely and honestly. If we feel that another person isn’t open to hearing what we have to say, we find ourselves shutting down, tuning out around them. The same dynamic is present in our relationship with God. If we want to build a sense of intimacy with God, we need to be able to express ourselves to God freely. The truth is, all of us yearn for things that we don’t have or that are not the case. We yearn for world peace and we yearn for a new car and if we spend a lot of energy censoring our prayers and only sharing those that seem lofty or admirable, we’re inhibiting our hearts connection with God.
But Jesus isn't just telling his disciples to express themselves. He’s teaching his disciples to pray in a way that will, over time, form and shape them into the kind of people who could actually follow him, not just travel with him, but actually live in his spirit, live in the way that he lived. The kind of praying he's encouraging isn't just expressive--it's formative.
One clue that Jesus was forming his disciples' hearts with this prayer comes in the paragraph after the words of the prayer. In order to hear what Jesus is saying, we have to hear them in the right tone. Although we often imagine Jesus to be extraordinarily gentle and serene, the Gospels show that he used provocation, hyperbole, humor and even a bit of teasing to make his points. He tells his disciples a story here about a man banging on the door of his neighbor in the middle of the night until the neighbor finally gets up and gives the man what he wants. If we hear Jesus tell this story in a serious, didactic fashion, we are left wondering if we can actually make God do what we want by becoming sufficiently annoying.
But I don’t think Jesus is trying to describe God with this story—I think he’s using a bit of humor to remind his disciples that persistence has value. We know this from our interactions with people, Jesus says, so why not bring the same value into our communication with God? Underneath this provocative story, there is a gentle acknowledgment that when we pray, we often feel like we are calling out to into the dark. We often find it hard to sense God’s presence in our prayers, so we begin to wonder if we are just talking to ourselves. Jesus seems to understand that feeling—and he says we should pray anyways. Just keep praying through the dark periods, through the doubting times, through the dry spells. Keep saying these words, keep showing up to prayer, because in the end, this isn’t just about expressing what you feel or what you think. Prayer in this sense is like practicing a musical instrument or training a dog or learning to bowl or play golf. Only by doing something over and over and over can you ever learn to do it at all. When we keep praying, even when we feel like we aren't getting anywhere with it, the practice of praying is itself having an affect on our lives. We're being formed by it.
Share the desires of your heart, share your deepest yearnings with God over and over, year in and year out, and your prayers will be like the stream that carves its bed into stone. They form in us a disposition of friendship towards God—a feeling that our deepest needs and desires are not irrelevant to God. God will not sleep through them. God will not keep the door locked as we pound on it. In fact, God desires good things for us. Like the benevolent parent, God wants to give us bread, not a snake.
Do you believe that? Do you have a relationship with God that is grounded and rooted in trust of that sort? Or perhaps you would like your faith to be deeper, your relationship with God to be more trusting? Then take a cue from Jesus here and examine your prayer practice. Don’t just consider how it feels to you or what it expresses. Consider how you are training yourself by what you practice. You may tell yourself that you will pray more once you’ve resolved some of your doubts or once you have a better understanding of who God really is and how God really acts. But by waiting for the mood to strike you, you may actually be training yourself to stay out of conversation with God, out of relationship.
Jesus’ teaching here points in a different direction. Pray these words, he says, and pray them persistently, and you will actually be acting as if God is who I tell you God is—holy and hopeful and compassionate and connected. Jesus says, pray as if what I tell you is true, and slowly, slowly, your prayers will form you into a person who can step into the kind of relationship with God, the kind of intimacy, the kind of reconciled friendship with God, which is the great, good gift Jesus came to offer us.
Mercedes Benz (Remix by Heather Kirk-Davidoff)
Oh Lord, won’t you give me the desire to pray?
To call out to you Lord, all night and all day
So much that I yearn for, so much I could say
Oh Lord, won’t you give me the desire to pray?
Oh Lord, won’t you give me a mind that can trust?
If it’s up to me, Lord, I know I’ll go bust!
I’ll count on your presence, if I really must
Oh Lord, won’t you give me a mind that can trust?
Oh Lord, won’t you give me a persistent heart?
I tend to give up, Lord, before I can start.
I trust that you’ll hear me if I do my part.
Oh Lord, won’t you give me a persistent heart?
Everybody!
Oh Lord, won’t you give me the desire to pray?
To call out to you Lord, all night and all day
So much that I yearn for, so much I could say
Oh Lord, won’t you give me the desire to pray?