Bold and Persistent

I reflect on the nature of prayer, drawing on Abraham’s intercession and Jesus’ teaching of the Lord’s Prayer. I encourage you to approach God with sincerity and persistence, reminding us that prayer is not about perfect words or special places, but about honest friendship with God. Exploring the intimacy of calling God “Father”, I share how prayer can deepen and change over time. Through biblical stories and personal experience, I invite you to pray boldly, trust God’s wisdom, and persevere in seeking His heart.

00:00:00 A man was walking along the street and you saw this young boy standing outside the church, knocking on the door, trying to to open the, the the locked door. And the man went up to to see, you know, what is it that you, you’re wanting to do? Why are you wanting to get into the church? And the boy said, well, look, I just want to speak to God, and surely this is the best place to do that. And the man said, well, the church is closed now, so you can’t go in there, but you don’t have to go to a certain place, a particular place, in order to be able to speak to God. You can simply talk to him from your heart. You can knock on the door of his heart with your own heart. That’s always enough. It’s important to to recognize that when we come to pray, so many of us kind of imagine that our prayer isn’t good enough, that we haven’t done enough, but we’re not using the right words.

00:00:58 You know, we try and and imagine that there must be the perfect way to pray. But one of the rules about prayer is there’s only one thing that we can get wrong in prayer, and that’s just not trying in the first place. As long as we turn up, as long as we are there and present, that’s always enough. It doesn’t really matter exactly what our words are, as long as we bring our heart to that space where we can simply be in that friendship with God. Because that’s what we learn from Abraham in the first reading today. You know, Sodom and Gomorrah was known as an awful, wicked place because they were so violent and inhospitable. They were known. And we see that across the scriptures, not for the other things that later they were associated with, but it was their hatred, their in hospitality, the brutality that marked this city as a place worthy of destruction. And Abraham knows that he has this friendship with God. He’s able to go into bat, even for people like that, people who are so violent and hate filled.

00:02:14 And yet Abraham decides that they’re worthy of this prayer of intercession. They’re worthy of bargaining with God. Abraham knows that God is not going to reject him. He’s a little bit circumspect. He couches it in very honoring language. If my Lord be pleased. And on all of this, but note the consistency of the answer of God. If there are 50 there, I will not destroy it there. 45. If there are 40. If there are 30. If there are 20. If there are ten. It gets a bit tedious reading it and listening to it, and I’m sure sometimes the Lord might feel a little bit of tedium listening to our prayers, but the invitation is there just to keep on putting the petition before the Lord, reshaping it, reformulating it, but offering that desire that we we want because prayer is, is more about what is happening in us. It’s about shaping and forming our own hearts. It’s about making our hearts to be like unto God. To make our hearts worthy of that experience.

00:03:19 Of being the friend of God. Being in the very presence of God. In the gospel, Jesus offers even more perspectives on this, this grace and this goodness. As he’s sitting there praying, caught in that silence, caught up in that friendship that he has with the father. Clearly the disciples see that there’s something special about what’s happening there. And so, Lord, teach us to pray. And so we’re given then the words of the Our Father. Note that in Luke’s version it’s much shorter, much more succinct than we have it in the Gospel of Matthew. And we tend to it seems to like the longer version of prayers. You know, it must be better if we have more words. So we pray Matthew’s version in church rather than Luke’s shorter, more succinct version. It’s a little bit of a salutary thing to just to remember that, no, the message is pretty much the same. It’s encapsulated so beautifully in Luke’s shorter version, and even in the the parables that follow the little descriptions that we have.

00:04:25 The scribes kind of want to throw things back into the text. And so one of the lines there for father, son asks for bread. Will the father give him a stone? It’s not there in the best manuscripts, but because it’s there in the sermon on the Mount, in the equivalent passage in the Gospel of Matthew. Some scribe has obviously added it back in to to this place. But the first manuscripts that we’ve been able to find, and we’re getting better at working out where which parts were added later on and which parts were the original. It’s one of those things that’s not there in the original. This invitation today, first into adoration to give honor to the name of the Lord. We bring that first, though, from that place of intimacy, being able to call God simply Father. It’s an invitation that is so profound and so Amazing. For most of my adult life as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus. My main prayer has always been directed to Jesus. It’s only been probably in the last 8 or 10 years that I’ve begun to pray more to the father himself.

00:05:36 And, you know, it’s appropriate that we we transition and change in our prayer. Maybe there’ll be a time when I pray more to the Holy Spirit that there are different moments and experiences in our prayer and in our ability to surrender to the Lord. But the Lord invites us into the honoring to that that prayer of adoration. But it’s also a prayer where we desire to be faithful to God, that we honor the Lord and recognize that he is the source of all of our needs. And so to pray for our daily provisions, to pray for what we need in this present moment, to pray for the gift of forgiveness, to forgive ourselves, to allow the Lord to have mercy on us, but to share that forgiveness then with those around us, and to pray that we won’t be put to the test. We know that the Lord often tests the ones he love. Inviting them into this deeper relationship. You know just this, in that they go to the gym very often, but, you know, there’s resistance and the ways that we need to do in order to build up the muscles.

00:06:42 There’s no point being able to do it simply and easily the first time. There needs to be that resistance to begin to grow and to force ourselves into a deeper reality within all of that. But then he goes on to give us that, the parable of the friend who comes. And remember, in the ancient Near East, most people lived in just one room, that everything kind of happened just in this one single room. So one part of it was for the sleeping, one part of it was for the preparation of food. One part was for the bodily purification. One part was for the sharing of life together. And so when everyone is already in bed, you’re all together. They’re huddled in the corner. And so for the father to get up and kind of move across all of the children and everyone would be disturbed. Not that they wouldn’t already be disturbed by the knocking on the door, but this invitation is that even if he doesn’t get up for friendship’s sake, persistence will be enough. And it is a particularly unique word that we we find there in the Greek, inviting us into this, this whole sense of, of really trusting that God will respond in friendship.

00:07:55 But even if we don’t feel that that is happening, to have the courage to have the boldness, just as Abraham does, to really continue to knock on the door, continue to really pour out what we need. There, of course, will be times when we don’t get what we think we want. The C.S. Lewis, the Anglican writer, you know, famously said that we will spend eternity thanking God for all the times he said no to us, all those times where we think that this is the will of God, this is the thing that we’re really wanting and desiring in the situation. But there are times when it’s not the case. And the Lord wants us to simply have the best, and sometimes the only way that he can appropriately answer our prayers is to say no. But he’s inviting us, even so, to continue to persevere, continue to pray with boldness, and continue to to trust in the friendship that we have with the Lord. That all those are the foundations of our life, of prayer.

00:08:57 To really continue to grow in those different areas, to to pray with that persistence, to pray that we will have that boldness, to trust that God does desire the very best for us, that he wants for us to experience that fullness of life with him, and to continue to grow in our prayer each day, as we move simply beyond the words that we pray and start to knock on the father’s heart, continue to seek the will of the Lord. Continue to desire that what we want is the same as what God wants, and we change our hearts to slowly make them more like the heart of the father.