Growing up, I’d sometimes ask my father for some money.  He didn’t often have much, but I don’t recall him ever saying no.  Later, when I was away at college and needed money but didn’t ask for it, my father now and again would send me $50.  Oh, was I glad to get that.  Those days were happy days.  Sometimes, we don’t even need to ask God and He blesses us anyway.  Back twenty years ago, that money helped, for sure, but the biggest help that came to me during those years was God Himself.  He was teaching me to know my truest, deepest need.  He was teaching me how to ask Him to fill that need.  We want many things, many things!  At heart, we need only one.

If current social research is giving an accurate account, more and more are living without God—that is, living without acknowledging Him or praising Him, living having nothing to do with God, though God gives them everything, even each breath.  They may say they don’t deny God, but their daily living is an ongoing denial.  When they say they don’t deny God, I’m afraid what they actually mean is they don’t deny god as they conceive god.  They don’t deny the god of their own fashioning.  They’re happy to have God along, so long as He doesn’t bother them, you know, by saying things or expecting stuff.  Their god is pretty much okay with whatever it is they’re doing or not doing, just like them.  I’ve been acquainted with that god.

What keeps us from following that path is what we’re doing right now.  What keeps us from following that path is reading the Bible.  What keeps us from following that path is prayer.  Jesus has some things to tell us about prayer.  One of the main things we need to keep in view is that prayer is not really about our wish list, not that it’s wrong to have a wish list, so long as they’re the right wishes.  Prayer is not about our wish list but about asking God to shape our lives, to provide us with what we need to live the way He asks of us.  Oh, how God loves such prayer!  God, be God for me, for You only can be.  Amen.

Jesus puts this in familiar terms: “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him’” (11:5-6).  Well, midnight is not a really convenient time.  Have you ever knocked on someone’s door at midnight?  Did they call the police?  Was it the right door?  Sometimes people in the dark knock on the wrong door, even though they’re convinced—they’re always quite sure—that it’s the right door.  The author John Cheever wrote about that.

Who asks for anything at midnight?  You should be in bed!  Who knocks on the door, begging, at midnight?  But haven’t you ever?  Who?  Someone in sudden, urgent need.  An emergency—lack, inability, helplessness.  The ambulance comes to Columbia Lakes often.  You can’t predict the time of day.  Sometimes it’s the middle of the night.  Now consider—what if there were no ambulance service?  When the emergency comes, sudden, unexpected, to whom can you turn?  You and I know the answer, but there are too many outside these doors who don’t.  They don’t really know their neighbors.  Family is far away, not always just geographically.

Who asks for anything at midnight?  But haven’t you ever?  Someone in urgent need.  Someone in the dark.  Someone who has nothing, but who knows, somehow, that you have something, must have something.  In the old days, like in the old Snuffy Smith comic strip, neighbors would pop next door to borrow a cup of sugar or flour, butter or milk.  Or, like in Blondie, your neighbor might borrow your ladder or drill—be sure to get it back!  Little things.  I don’t know whether such borrowing happens much anymore; I suspect it probably doesn’t.  We may not know our neighbors as well as we used to.  Maybe we don’t actually want to know them: they’re kind of loud, or annoying, or they just won’t stop talking and we have things to do, you know?

So, the need comes to us, to our door, and what shall we answer?  “Don’t bother me.  The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed.  I can’t get up and give you anything” (11:7).  Yet he’s already up, awake, listening.  “Leave me alone.  You see, it’s impossible.  Why are you doing this to me?  Come back later, maybe.  Or maybe don’t.”

One winter back in Oregon, when I was still an inexperienced driver, I was trying to get the car in or out of the driveway—I don’t remember which.  It was snowy; the traction wasn’t good, and my parents’ blue ’84 Ford LTD was not an all-weather champ.  The car was stuck halfway in, halfway out.  I went to my neighbor’s door; he was an older, retired man.  We didn’t know each other very well, though we had been neighbors for more than a decade.  He opened the door.  Nestled there in the crook of his arm was a bowl of warm chocolate chip cookies.  I explained my predicament and asked if he could help me.  Finishing a cookie, he regretted, politely, that he could not help.  Rejection.  Refusal.  What do you do then?  Seek to fill the need elsewhere?  Just give up?  Ask for a cookie, anyway?

People seek to fill their needs many places, in many ways.  It may seem to work for a while, until it doesn’t anymore.  But the need doesn’t change, that basic underlying need, no matter how people try to act like it’s not there, or doesn’t matter, or simply can’t be filled.  As for giving up?  I’ve always liked the saying that hope is help.  To be hopeless then—to give up—is to be helpless indeed.  There’s a sad place to be!  But God calls out, His Word cries out, everywhere to everyone, anyone who will listen, who will come, that there is help, there is hope.  Ask.  Seek.  Knock.  “I tell you, even though [your neighbor] will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need” (11:8).  Here!  Now go away and let me sleep!  “Shameless audacity.”  Wow.  Persistence in proportion to the urgency of the need.  Someone comes to you, asking, and though you may have nothing to give, you know who does have enough and more than enough: “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you.  In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk” (Ac 3:6).

What is the opposite of audacity?  Hesitation?  A lack of boldness.  And the opposite of shameless?  Prideful.  According to the wisdom of Proverbs, “Better to be a nobody and yet have a servant than pretend to be somebody and have no food” (Pr 12:9).  Too proud to ask.  Pride goeth before a fall.  In Christ, you and I have a servant.  How well we are fed.

It may take shameless audacity to wheedle something out of our neighbor—hopefully, it doesn’t take the same for our neighbor to get something from us!  Boldness, candor—this is what God invites us to by prayer.  Open all your heart to Me, He says, for My heart is open to you.  That’s Christ!  God knows all our need; He knows all we’ve hidden from others, even ourselves.  It’s as we begin to know this, to live in all this truth, that prayer ceases to be a numb, stammering dead end burden and becomes a stream of grace, mercy, and peace.  Streams of mercy, never ceasing, wherein our souls can find relief.  Prayer invites us into hope and educates us in faith.  Prayer, like faith, is a work of time: that weekly, daily, bending of our lives “toward God, of following a way that is against our natural inclination.”[1]  Prayer teaches patience; prayer teaches persistence.  The neighbor gave just to be done with you; God gives because He delights in you.

God shall supply all our need (Phil 4:19).  Our wishes and wants, maybe not, but our needs, definitely.  As we pray, He teaches us about our needs.  As He meets our needs, God teaches us about faith, and prayer.  You and I pray for what we (think we) want.  God wants us to learn to pray for what we need.  He intends to teach us to know our need.  When we come before God in the keen awareness of our true need, He opens the door.  “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” (11:9).

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.

               [1] William H. Willimon.  Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry.  Nashville: Abingdon P, 2002.  333.