The Prayer God Will Always Answer

During our adult Sunday School class this past Sunday, our congregation studied Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer from Luke 11:1-13. Jesus taught his disciples how to pray by his example and his words. 

Luke referred to Jesus’s normal practice of praying alone more than all the other gospel writers. After one of his private times of prayer, Jesus’s disciples ask him to teach them to pray. Interestingly, they don’t ask him to teach them to pray as he prays. Rather, they ask him to teach them to pray like John the Baptist taught his disciples to pray. I think they did this for two reasons. First, they knew Jesus had a unique relationship with His Heavenly Father that they couldn’t mimic. Second, they wanted practical lessons on how they are to pray. They wanted to pray but didn’t feel confident doing it because they believed that they didn’t know how to do it. So, Jesus taught them. 

The most intriguing part of Jesus’s instruction on prayer as Luke records it is verse 13 where Jesus says, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

To understand the first clause of this conditional statement — If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children…, we have to understand that Jesus is referring to two illustrations he used in verses 11 and 12. There he taught, “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?” No human father, who has the good of his son or his daughter in mind, would give his son or his daughter something harmful instead of something good. If they need a fish to eat, he’s not going to give them a snake. If they need an egg, he’s not going to give them a scorpion. Being good to your children is intuitive and expected even for sinful men and women. Jesus’s point is simple: if this is true for us, how much truer is it for our Heavenly Father who is inherently and perfectly good? 

Jesus takes this spiritual truth and applies it in a specific way at the end of this verse by teaching that our Heavenly Father will not withhold His Holy Spirit from those who ask for Him. Our temptation when reading Jesus’s teaching on prayer, often, is to think God is binding himself to give us everything we ever ask for from him. For instance, Jesus says in Luke 11:9-10 that we will receive that for which we ask, that we will find that which we seek, and the doors upon which we knock will be opened. Is Jesus saying that we will get everything for which we long? No, he is not. God is far wiser than we are and has better plans for us than we could ever imagine. Sometimes he must tell us no for our own good. 

What did Jesus mean, then, since he clearly taught that “everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks the door will be opened?” The answer is found in the promise that Father will never withhold His Spirit from those who ask him. Our greatest need in this life is to have the anointing and guidance of the Holy Spirit as we seek to fulfill God’s call to be faithful to Him in our lives. Thankfully, our Father will always meet that need. He will never withhold the Holy Spirit from us, and He will guide us in our prayers. He will enlighten us to our real needs and teach us to prioritize our requests to God as we pray. The more we grow in our relationship with God in Christ through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, our prayers will specifically target our actual needs, which we know God is sure to meet. So, maturing in the faith means we leave behind the broad, materialistic, and human-centric prayers of our youth and learn to make specific, spiritually alive, and God-honoring requests of our good and gracious God. That’s the beauty of Jesus’s model prayer. 

“Father, hollowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread, 
and forgive our sins.
     for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. 
And lead us not into temptation.” 

May you all be blessed in Christ and may God be pleased to pour His Spirit out upon you as you ask for Him. May he also teach you to pray in the same manner that Jesus taught His disciples while on earth.