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.