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Sunday 22 June 2014

'JESUS ON PRAYER'

Rev. Brian Wilkie
By Rev. Brian Wilkie                                                                                    

Pastor of St. Andrew's Christian Community
Rockland, Ontario


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PODCAST LINK to CFRA broadcast - Sunday, June 22nd, 2014:
http://proxy.autopod.ca/podcasts/chum/6/23102/good_news_110_june22.mp3
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Broadcast Notes:
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‘Jesus on Prayer


Welcome to Good News In the Morning a program of words and music bringing a Christian message of hope and encouragement to those who are looking for intelligent, meaningful and spirited approach to faith and to life.

Good morning and welcome to Good News In the Morning. I'm your host today, Brian Wilkie of St. Andrew's Christian Church in Rockland. You can find out more about this ministry on the web at www.GNCM.ca GoodNewsChristianMinistries.ca. I do want to thank you for listening today and for your encouragement and support .Please remember that you can always visit our website for materials to encourage and support you in your Christian walk.

If you miss an episode of the show you can go to our website and download the podcast or the MP3 of our broadcast.

Today, as I speak to you and as we share together in God's word I want to look at a teaching of Jesus which is a beautiful, wonderful teaching on prayer. I'm going to read to you from Luke chapter 11 beginning at verse 5.

5 Then he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, 6 because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.’
7 “Then the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.
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; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.


This Scripture is really a wonderful teaching on prayer but it's one that has been widely misinterpreted and can seem to give quite a different message than the intended one. I'm going to share with you today some thoughts on the Scripture that I learned from Don Sunukjian, who is a professor of preaching at Talbot Seminary. He was at the Moody Bible Institute's Pastors’ Conference, which I attended in the month of May. At that wonderful experience we heard much great teaching. This is one piece that was done so well, I just want to share with you as best I can. We are going to take a look at this Scripture in which he speaks about a man who has a need, because a friend who has come unexpectedly.

When you hear this Scripture, perhaps you've heard it before, and when you hear the message of this Scripture about the friend that won't open the door, what does it speak to you about God's attitude to prayer? Has it been told you, or has a been taught to you that the meaning of this passage of Scripture is that you really need to kind of batter on God's door when you pray? That you just have to keep on banging on the door because God doesn't want to help you, but he will if you are persistent enough? Is that the kind of message you have gotten out of this Scripture? Well as we look at this today, I think you will find that the message is really quite different, substantially different from that.  You're going to be encouraged by the word of God in this Scripture. Well, we will do that and look more deeply at it in a few moments, but as we usually do, we will to listen to some music that is in praise of God and remembering his good works. I'd like you to listen with me to the following song. This is a song from Steven Curtis Chapman's new album, Deep Roots in which he goes back to his family's roots with a bit of a bluegrass feel. Here he sings the familiar hymn “He Touched Me.”

As we look at the Scripture from Luke chapter 11, we need to think about what the situation is here. What is this situation which Jesus is talking about and how is it familiar and meaningful to the disciples at that time?

He describes that you've received a friend late at night. He's come unexpectedly and you have nothing to set before him. So you go next door to a friend, you knock on his door and you ask for some help. Why has this friend arrived unexpectedly? Why has he arrived in need of food? Why has he arrived so late at night? We must remember of course that we are talking about a different era. We are talking about Palestine in Judea in the early first century. You can imagine traveling in those days. There is no means of phoning someone ahead and saying, “I’ll be there at 4 o'clock.” You likely are traveling by foot in a very warm climate. It was the practice in those days that people wouldn't start their journeys until the heat of the day had passed. if they knew in advance that they were going to visit a friend, they might be able to send a message through another friend and say, “I’ll be coming sometime next month,” but it was difficult to be more precise. In that there was no Postal Service per se, there was no email, telephones.  They didn't use smoke signals for that kind of thing. No, long-distance communication was a trial. So everybody knew that the unexpected could happen; that someone could drop in any day. They wouldn't resent that or feel like it was an imposition. They would be happy to have these infrequent visits from their friends. It wasn't a case of being able to just hop in the car in drive 20 or 30 miles and just spent an afternoon with somebody. No, traveling was a big deal in that day. I'm amused by the fact that the English word ‘travel’ is from the French word ‘travail’ which means ‘hard labor, difficulty.’

So imagine that the friend started out as the day starts to cool, as everyone would. He’s been walking. Galilee doesn't have McDonald's to stop by on the way. He probably doesn't have the resources to eat out, even at the Inns (and the inns weren't exactly the safest places in many cases). So when he arrives he's perhaps Dusty and tired. Perhaps a couple of hours ago it got dark, and he thought, “I’ll just press on a few more miles and I'll be able to get to my friends house.”  He arrives and you are there. H knocks on the door, you get up in the welcome him in –and then you realize you've got nothing to feed him. Bread in those days was a staple, and it was used to serve the sauces and the dips that would make a part of a bigger meal. There you are without anything to give him. A man was walking all day and you know that your duty as a friend and as a host is to give him something before he goes to bed.

Now in that situation Jesus says to the disciples, and perhaps the New International Version is not as clear as some other versions. Jesus puts the whole situation as a hypothetical situation. In the New International Version it reads “suppose one of you has a friend and he goes to him at midnight and says friend lend me three loaves of bread.” That doesn't quite get the nuance of Jesus’ teaching.

In fact the next story begins with the proper phrasing from the Greek of the New Testament when he says, “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish would give him a snake instead?” Understand here in this case that Jesus is asking a hypothetical question where the answer would be expected to be “No, None of us!” Would any of you fathers, if you son asked for a fish give him a snake instead? The answer would be, “No obviously not.” If he asked for an egg will you give him a scorpion? No, never! Never. Jesus asked this kind of a question to show people how silly it would be to think of God as being less generous and less good than even a human father. He says, “if you wouldn't do that, don't you think that God will give good gifts to his children?

Well how does this story become about God giving good gifts to his children? This story, which we've often thought meant we really had to force God's hand in prayer?

Well, we’ll look at that in more depth after we listen to this hymn from A Celebration Of Hymns a collection of hymns called Reflective Moments. This hymn, the familiar Good Friday hymn There Is A Green Hill Far Away.

To help us understand the story Jesus is telling, and the meaning that it has for prayer, let me put a hypothetical situation to you. Supposing that you are asleep in bed one night, and use the phone rings you get a message that a family member is in deep distress in another city. let's in this hypothetical situation suggest that it's it your mother. She's living at some distance from you and she has just been put into the hospital possibly with the stroke. Now you wake up and you know that you have to be there with your mother. You need to go now. You need to go and see her. You and your wife both need to be there, because dad’s going to need some help, and mom’s going to need some comfort, encouragement. So you think about how you going to do this. The kids can't go with you, You can't put them all on the airplane, you can't afford the flight. They have school, They have other things they need to do, and you just don't know how long this is going to be. You are trying to figure out what to do.

Now let me put the hypothetical question to you as, Jesus put it to his disciples. Which of you, if you were in this situation, would call up your friend, who perhaps lives a couple of doors down the street? You call them up that very night, in the middle of the night. You pick up the phone and say to your friend, ”Dear Bob, could you and Martha please take our kids for the next couple of days because we’ve got a go in and see to my mother in another town.” Now which of you, if you called up your friend and asked him that question, would find that the friend would say, “oh, I'm sorry Jim. I really just got into bed. I was just settling down. You know, we've already turned the alarm on, and I’ll have to put in the code again and turn it off. And then that I'd have to unlock the doors and get out blankets for the kids, and that sort of thing. It would be a lot of trouble, Jim.”
Do you think your friend would answer like that? I bet you're saying, “No!” You are thinking that your friend would answer the phone and say, ”I'm so sorry to hear that. We’ll do everything we can. Bring the kids over, and we will have beds ready for them in the spare rooms. We will make up some snacks for you to take on the road so you can keep alert and awake – we will have some coffee for you. Can we take care of the pets while you're gone? Do you need anything done in the house? Will the plants need water?”

Which of you has a friend that would take that second answer? Of course I certainly hope you all have a friend like that. That is the expectation that Jesus has when he asked the disciples this question, “Which of you has a friend that would say to you, “I can't get out, my kids are asleep. I might wake them. I've already put the bar across the door and you know that lock sticks. “NO, no,” the disciples are thinking, “That's not a friend. I know my friend would be out there and giving me what I need.”
This is in fact the meaning of the parable.

When the Scriptures come to one very difficult word they have a great deal of trouble translating it, because Jesus says in this parable, “I tell you though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man's boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs. Now this word boldness in English is a translators attempt to capture the meaning of the Greek word. If you look into the into other versions, or the footnotes even, of the New International Version you find some translators say, “because of this man's persistence” or in the King James version it'll say, “because of your importunity,” which is essentially the same thing as persistence. The word that is being translated is a word that occurs only once in the New Testament so it's very hard to find a translation for it. Usually when you try to translate a word you can see how it's used in other contexts, but this unique word is a lot of trouble. If you search through the versions of the Bible you might have at home or search on the Internet, you'll find that each translator, each version, takes a different approach to it, which shows you how difficult this word is to translate. The word in its root meaning is composed of two parts. One part that means ‘without’ and the other part means ‘shame.’
‘Without shame.’ It's still hard to put that into the sentence and understand its meaning. It looks like, given the situation which Jesus describes, that Jesus is saying that the fact that you asked him, the fact that you thought of him, and asked him, is enough to make the man give whatever you need. you see, you were not ashamed to phone your friend. You knew you could count on them, you knew that they loved you and they would understand your situation. You knew that they would be ready to do whatever they could, that they would bend over backwards to help you. When that person received the call, though they’re rubbing the sleep out of their eyes and trying to focus,  they’re also thinking, “I'm so glad that he thought to call me because I can help here.”

Your shamelessness, your readiness without any shame to come and approach your friend is a great commendation of your friend. Likewise, Jesus says God is pleased when his children are not ashamed to turn to him and ask for what they need. “Indeed he will get up and give you as much is you need.” Jesus concludes the parable with these words, “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.”
Is this a parable about twisting God's arm? About annoying him until he finally gives in? No, this is a parable about the readiness of God to hear your need, to understand your want. His readiness to be a friend who will move heaven and earth to show you his love, his grace and his sufficiency.

Let's thank God for this in prayer.

Almighty God, thank you so much for being a generous and good God. You've given us life, you've given us so many blessings in this world, and when we are in need, Lord, you have given us hope that we can turn to you and seek from you your help and sustaining power. We thank you for this in Jesus name, amen.

Well, thank you, listeners, for your for your participation in this program. I do hope that you will continue to tune in week by week and that you will, if you are able, to support our ministry financially. You can help us to continue to reach listeners throughout the Ottawa River Valley by making a check payable to Good News Christian Ministries and sending it to P.O. Box 184 Rideau Ferry, Ontario K0G 1W0. We will be happy to send you a receipt at income tax time.

You can also make donations through the website. I also do want to encourage you to tell others about this program and help them to be encouraged by these words from Scriptures week by week.

Please be sure to worship in a church where the gospel is soundly proclaimed and lived out with compassion, integrity and resolve.

Now to conclude our program I would like to have you listen to this song, Immortal, Invisible God Only Wise. It is an old hymn sung by the a cappella group Glad from their album A Cappella Hymns.

I do pray the Lord will hold your heart and you would know Jesus personally and profoundly. May the Holy Spirit reside deep within your heart. May the heavenly Father surround you with his constant, abiding and accompanying love.

Good News In The Morning is produced in the Studios of News Talk Radio 580 CFRA.

- Rev. Brian Wilkie
St. Andrew's Christian Community, Rockland, Ontario
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To listen to the above broadcast, click on the following link:

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