LUKE 11 1 13 SERMON WRITER HOW TO

The “Friend at Midnight” story reminds us that prayer pops up all the time and does not wait for convenient seasons or moments. In a way, the two brief parabolic examples that Jesus gives back up this perspective on life as ongoing prayer. Let no one who hears us preach on this passage conclude that what the Lord’s Prayer is mostly all about is a list of certain requests. And when is it that we don’t want to be tempted? Is it just for the next half-hour or so? The balance of this particular day? Just tomorrow? Or is temptation something we want to avoid forever and anon? What do we pray for? That we not be led into temptation. What do we pray for? Daily bread and ongoing forgiveness-we pray to be forgiven by God on the basis of the fact that we are ourselves engaged in acts of forgiveness all the time. What do we pray for? The coming of the kingdom. What do we pray for? The hallowing of God’s very Name.

Because when you think about it, each petition and phrase Jesus gives is a nearly all-encompassing reality. When you frame the Lord’s Prayer as a way first of all to pray without ceasing, the specifics that Jesus mentioned make more sense and take on a new meaning. (And if this perspective on Luke 11 is correct, we could observe a degree of irony in the fact that subsequent generations of Christians did turn the Lord’s Prayer into a word-for-word memorized form of prayer!) What they were inquiring after was how they could, in imitation of their Master, turn the entirety of their lives into an extended act of prayer, the same as they observed was the case for Jesus himself.

But in reality what the disciples wanted was not a litany of key phrases or a checklist of prayer items.

LUKE 11 1 13 SERMON WRITER HOW TO

When someone prayed as much as Jesus did, it really didn’t matter where this precise incident took place-the point is that Jesus prayed all the time to the extent that the disciples finally just had to know how to do that themselves.Īll of which leads to an important point when it comes to preaching on Luke 11: often we think that what the disciples asked for were the words to say when praying. This was not like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address-a one-time, rather unusual event worthy of a very specific memorializing. But Jesus prayed so regularly that in the minds of the disciples, it all blurred together. Had Jesus prayed only rarely or on only certain high ceremonial occasions, then maybe it would have been both easy and important to record a few more details. And I think we can guess at the reason: the disciples saw Jesus praying so often that it was, as a matter of fact, difficult to recall the precise day and location of the time he gave them this particular model prayer to follow. Given how sizeable Luke’s narrative skills are, you have to assume there was a reason for this. But in Luke 11:1, Luke very casually says that when Jesus uttered this model prayer, it happened “one day” when Jesus was praying “in a certain place.” The curious reader wants to ask, “Well, WHAT day was it? WHERE did this happen?”īut Luke gives us no such clue. Today if we were documenting the first-ever presentation of something that went on to become very famous and momentous, we’d want to nail it down to a specific date, place, and occasion. So how ironic it is to notice that in Luke’s presentation of this prayer, the narrative details are very sparse. The Lord’s Prayer is hands down one of the most famous prayers ever.

Luke 11 1 13 sermon writer