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Prayer and Spiritual Warfare, The word of God

“Lord, teach us to pray!”

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When they disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, what did He do? The standard answer is “He gave us the Lord’s prayer.”

Indeed He did, but the Lord’s prayer wasn’t all the teaching. The Lord’s prayer in Luke 11 finishes at verse 4 with “Deliver us from the evil one,” but the teaching continues in verse 5:

“And He said to them, “Which of you shall have a friend, and go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine has come to me on his journey, and I have nothing to set before him.”

The parable of the Importunate friend follows, concluding with the exhortation from Jesus, transcribed  in the Greek present continuous tense, to “Ask (and keep on asking), and it will be given to you; seek (and keep on seeking) and you will find; knock (and keep on knocking) and the door will be opened to you.” We are not told why we need to persist, but we are told it is important: Jesus repeats the point in the parable of the unjust judge (Luke 18:1-8). We can hazard some guesses as to why: maybe our persistence demonstrates our love, maybe it builds our faith, and God certainly needs to see both our love and our faith when we come to Him in prayer. And sometimes we need to persist because we have an enemy who is interfering with the process, as Daniel discovered (Daniel 10:13-21) when the answer to his prayer was delayed. But persist we must.

There is still more to this than an encouragement to persist in prayer. The friend isn’t asking for bread for himself; he is asking for bread for “a friend who has come to me on his journey.” Jesus is teaching us to persist in our prayers for others who are on their own journey, and whose need has come to our attention. So as well as being persistent, prayer here is about the needs of others. A distinction between the old and new testament models of prayer is that old testament prayer – primarily the Psalms – is about seeking God to meet personal needs; whereas the new testament model is about “us,” whether we are looking at the Lord’s prayer (forgive us, lead us, deliver us, give us) or Paul’s prayers for the churches. Love flows through new testament prayer life. We pray for our friends; our friends pray for us.

Living Bread
Now we come to the prayer itself. The friend asks for bread. As we know from Matthew 4:4 the “bread” that we are to live by is “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” The importunate friend asking for bread represents us going to our Friend, Jesus, and asking Him for a word from the mouth of God that will meet the need of our companion. God “watches over His word to perform it.” (Jer 1:12) God’s word is “living and active” – it is imbued with God’s life and energy (the Greek translated as active is energes). We find the same “energy” word when James is writing about the prayer of a righteous man: “Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.” (James 5: 15) Again, prayer here is not asking for bread for self, but for others.

 God says of His word

“It shall not return to Me void,
But it shall accomplish what I please,
And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:11)

It is the word itself that carries the power to heal, provide, deliver. Jesus cast out demons with a word. The nobleman who came to Jesus for “bread” for his sick son “believed the word that Jesus spoke to him,” (John 4: 50) as did the centurion with the sick servant. (Luke 7: 1-10) Jesus tells us that the words He speaks to us “are spirit, and they are life.” (John 6:63) And not only do the words – the “bread” – that we receive carry the life and power of God, they also carry the weight of His authority. His word is forever “settled in heaven.” (Ps 119:89) The Strong’s entry for the Hebrew word translated as ”settled” is “to stand, take one’s stand, stand upright, be set (over), establish.” The rule of God’s word over creation, and over the prayer need that we have sought it for, is established forever. Jesus told the nobleman “Go your way, your son shall live.” When we receive a word from the mouth of God that our needy friend can live by, that word has the authority of heaven to bring God’s rule into their situation, and the life and energy to transform it. We have to persist until we receive it.

Stones and Bread.
Jesus finishes His teaching on prayer with a final set of illustrations:

“If a son asks for bread  from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? Or if he asks for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” (Luke 11: 11-13)

The “bread” is always delivered by the Holy Spirit. Jesus said of the Holy Spirit “He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:14) We cannot receive a word from God by looking in a Bible index to find an appropriate scripture, unless the Lord sovereignly leads us there. We cannot quote a healing verse that we know and apply it to someone’s sickness unless the Holy Spirit has quickened it to us.  We cannot recite learned verses of God’s provision and expect our bank accounts to suddenly go into credit. We cannot wield the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, other than by the Spirit. It is always “by my Spirit,” never “by might nor by power.” (Zech 4:6)

Our Father in Heaven is longing to give us bread: He doesn’t give stones. And He wants us to ask for bread until we get it: the Greek word aiteō, translated as “ask,” suggests the confident requisitioning of items that the giver expects to release; or “insistent asking without qualms,” as one commentary puts it. James makes it clear that prayers with selfish motives are not answered when he writes: You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures. (James 4:3) But I think there may be many cases of unanswered prayer that come about because we are not waiting for the Spirit to deliver the bread, and we are not persisting in our asking. Instead we pick up the nearest stone, and wonder why it doesn’t bring life.

Knowing God, Living by Faith, Pursuing Love, The word of God

Ask, Seek, and Knock: Living the Sermon on the Mount.

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Jesus introduces the sermon on the mount with the statement: “”Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It’s easy to miss the full meaning of “poor” in this context. The Greek word used here is ptochos – which Strong’s defines as “ reduced to beggary; asking for alms, destitute of wealth, influence, position , honour.” The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who know, deep in their spirits, that they have absolutely nothing of their own that could deserve it. As evangelicals we know that of course – or at least, we certainly should – which is why we have to come to the Cross for forgiveness and be born again. But what struck me is the connection between this opening statement of the Lord’s ministry and these verses in the middle and towards the end of the sermon:

 “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” (Matt 6:33)

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” (Matt 7: 7-11)

Maybe it’s my own carnality at work here, but when I’ve thought about the “good things” that my Heavenly Father has in store for me I have tended to think more in terms of earthly “things” than heavenly ones. I think that this is mainly because it comes after verse 33 of the previous chapter, quoted above, where Jesus makes it very clear that we should trust our heavenly Father for our material needs, and keep our focus on the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. But in the context of this verse, what we surely “ask, seek and knock” for is the Kingdom and the righteousness of God, not our material provision. In fact Jesus tells us specifically not to worry about the other stuff that the Gentiles – the people who don’t know God – seek. He doesn’t say don’t ask for it at all, because He teaches us practically in the same breath to ask for our daily bread, but what He wants us to do is to trust our Father, Jehovah Jireh, as the faithful source of our provision and not to worry about it and “seek” it because we don’t know where it is coming from. We do know.

Manna from Heaven
The tense of “Ask, seek and knock” is the present continuous: “ask and keep on asking…”  If God gives us good things from the storehouses of Heaven when we ask for them, Jesus is telling us not only to seek, and keep seeking, the Kingdom of God; but also that He will give us what we ask for: “Ask, and it will be given to you, seek and you will find…” as indeed Luke adds in his rendering of this passage: “Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32)

This is where we return to our opening verse: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Those who receive the blessing are the spiritual beggars, continually crying out to God for His Kingdom and His righteousness, but also knowing that it is His good pleasure to keep answering their prayers. God wants relationship: He want us to keep coming and receiving from His hand, not helping ourselves, like hopper-fed chickens, to the provision that he has downloaded and left for us. Manna from Heaven only lasts one day.

Therefore…
Bible Teacher Andrew Wommack famously says, “Whenever you see a therefore, you must ask what it is there for.”

Verses 11-14 of Matthew 7 go like this:

“If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

So what is this therefore there for? Jesus seems to jump completely from one topic to another. But if we work backwards through this statement  I think we can see where He is going. To obey the Law – to do God’s will – we have to enter the narrow gate, and not travel the broad way. We can only enter by the narrow gate if we are poor in spirit and ask Father to give us what we need to live a Kingdom life. Only when we ask for His Kingdom provision can we truly achieve the love for others that the Royal Law demands. It is difficult; we have to keep asking for the Kingdom of God to be a reality in our lives (“Your Kingdom come..) to stay on this path. Like the hero of Pilgrim’s Progress, it is easy to wander off track. A comparison with Luke’s rendering is again useful here: instead of saying our Father will give “good things” when we ask, Luke says: “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” (Luke 11:13)

Good Things
The “good things” we need from the hand of God to love others as we love ourselves only come by the Holy Spirit, and we have to keep asking for them. Another well-know present continuous tense in the New Testament is Eph 5:18: “Be filled (keep being filled” with the Holy Spirit.”  To keep being filled with the Holy Spirit isn’t just so that we can walk in supernatural gifting: we need to keep being filled because if we don’t we are spiritually destitute and lacking in the righteousness of the Kingdom of God. “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”

As Jesus comes to the end of His message He makes it clear that it is not the gifting that we receive by the Spirit but our love –the love of God –  “that has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5) – that qualifies us for Kingdom entry. When He tells us that it is “by their fruits” that we can tell the difference between true sheep and “ravenous wolves”, He says: “Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name? And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!” (Matt 7:23)

Building on the rock
Those who ‘do many wonders’ but whom Jesus says He never knew are the ones who don’t obey “ the Law and the prophets,” which is to love others by our actions, doing to them as we would have done to ourselves.  This is how we enter by the narrow gate. It is not our gifting that brings us into the kingdom of heaven, but our obedience to the Royal law, which produces our fruitfulness. (Matt 7:17) The great themes of this introduction to the Kingdom of God cascade right through the New Testament – abiding in the vine (John 15), bearing the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5), the deception of spiritual pride (The Church in Sardis, Rev 3) and much, much more.

The Sermon on the Mount ends with the picture of the house built on the rock. We build on the rock when we are obedient to God’s word, seeking Him continually for the “good things” of the Kingdom that are the foundations our house, being filled with the Holy Spirit to satisfy our hunger and thirst for righteousness. “Let your waist be girded and your lamps burning; and you yourselves be like men who wait for their master, when he will return from the wedding, that when he comes and knocks they may open to him immediately,” He says. (Luke 12: 35-36) By living in obedience to His Kingdom message today, we prepare ourselves for when He comes back tomorrow.  It is possible to build a house with gifting alone, but it will be built on sand; and when trials and temptations come it will fall. We don’t have to look far across the landscape of the church to see the houses of gifted leaders in ruins on the sandy ground of their unsubmitted lives.

More houses will fall as God continues to shake heaven and earth and purifies His bride to prepare her for His return. How do we make sure we are building on the rock? Recognise that without Him we are destitute of the good things of the Kingdom that will enable us to love others as we are commanded, and have the faith to keep asking God to fill  us with those things by His Spirit, trusting Him for our daily provision, which we keep second in line to our great spiritual need.