Jesus said to his disciples
Jesus moved from teaching his disciples the prayer we call the Our Father reinforcing this teaching with other important dimensions about the life of prayer.
Suppose one of you has a friend
to whom he goes at midnight and says,
‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread,
for a friend of mine has arrived at my house from a journey
and I have nothing to offer him,’
Jesus often compared our own prayer to someone, who, from the human point of view, would be inconvenient or even annoying. Since God never sleeps nor slumbers, and is not inconvenienced by anything we ask, why these analogies? Presumably it is so that we ourselves feel bold to ask for what we need. Even if with feel that what we are asking is just too much, or if we feel that we have already asked too many times, God wants us to understand that he will not for these reasons deny us. In fact, what he is looking for is persistence, the strengthening of the desire within us for what he himself desires to give.
So I say to you, Ask and keep on asking and it shall be given you; seek and keep on seeking and you shall find; knock and keep on knocking and the door shall be opened to you (see Luke 11:9, Amplified Bible).
Prayer is meant to teach us persistence, and so the Lord, by his use of imagery, helps us to learn to feel free to persist, like the neighbor at midnight, or like the importunate widow entreating the unjust judge. The Lord even allows us to imagine him as one we persuade by our efforts, because he so desires these efforts from us. God is presented in the humble and even amusing images of the neighbor who is overwhelmed with continued knocking and of the unjust judge who is finally sufficiently frightened of the widow that he concedes to her desire. He allows himself to be presented this way so that ourselves learn to act the part of the persistent party who persuades, even in the face of repeated apparent refusal. This does mean that at times it may feel to us as though we have been refused repeatedly by an indifferent neighbor or an unjust judge. But that we should recognize this as a sign to ask and keep asking rather than a sign to give up.
For everyone who asks, receives;
and the one who seeks, finds;
and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
Our Father in heaven wills our good far more perfectly than anyone on earth, even our earthly parents. What he wants for us is precisely the greatest good we can receive, the only good in which we can truly rest and be at peace. Therefore we should not actually suspect him of malice or injustice, or that he was only setting us up for painful disappointment. Rather, we should realize that he is teaching us to open ourselves to something even better than we could ask or imagine.
If you then, who are wicked,
know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit
to those who ask him?”
Even opening ourselves to this gift is only possible by grace. It is not a matter of something done once and then set in stone, but the work of a lifetime.
After beginning with the Spirit,
are you now ending with the flesh?
It is all too possible to begin with the Spirit, with fervor and spiritual experiences, and yet to end in the flesh. That is why we must realize that we have not yet received all the Father has for us and keep asking for it, continuing to open ourselves to his Spirit every day of our lives.
This was the oath he swore to our father Abraham:
to set us free from the hands of our enemies,
free to worship him without fear,
holy and righteous in his sight
all the days of our life.
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