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In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear saints, a good friend of mine, Pastor Paul’s up in Idaho, summarized prayer better than anyone I think I’ve ever heard summarize it. He says, prayer is the children of God saying, but Dad, you promised. And I think that’s perfect, just exactly how Jesus teaches us to pray. But, Dad, you promised.
The important thing about this is that prayer starts not with ourselves, with our own needs or wants or whatever, but in fact it starts with the Word of God, with the promises of God, with the gifts of God, with the things that the Lord has offered to us. In fact, that’s one of the great blessings of the Lord’s prayer, where Jesus says, here’s what I want to give you, ask me for these things.
That’s why we don’t pray our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name if it be your will. Because we know it, in fact, is his will, that his name would be hallowed by us. We don’t pray, let thy kingdom come if it be your will, because we know it’s his will for his kingdom to come. We don’t pray, thy will be done if it be thy will. Because that doesn’t make any sense anyways.
But this is a whole point of the Lord’s prayer, is that we’re praying that the Lord would keep His promises with us. And it just so happens. This is just unbelievably amazing that the things that the Lord wants to give to us are exactly the things that we need. Exactly. We need His name holy. We need His kingdom to come. We need His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We need daily bread. We need the forgiveness of sins. We need leading and deliverance. We need all of these things, and these are the things that the Lord promises to give to us.
So when we pray, we come before the Lord and we say, but Dad, you promised. It’s beautiful. Now, there’s sometimes a gap between the asking and the answering of God. And Jesus has some instructions on this as well.
By the way, just so you have your head around where we’re headed, we’re headed to the last verse of the text, and I really want to focus on that promise of the Holy Spirit. We’re going to get there pretty quickly, but we want to make sure we touch on the stuff in between.
Jesus gives us this beautiful parable. Well, it’s a funny parable. It’s wonderful for us. Of the man who has visitors coming in the middle of the night. So there he is, it’s dark, it’s midnight, and someone traveling from afar comes and knocks in the door, comes in to stay with him, and he needs to give him something to eat, something to drink, and he’s got no bread. He’s got no food to give to him. So he goes to his neighbor’s house, and he knocks on the door, and he says, hey, I need to borrow some bread. And the neighbor says, go away. All the kids are in bed, it’s quiet, shh, no, tomorrow morning, I’ll be fine. And the neighbor just keeps knocking. Like, this is like what I used to do to my little brothers when we were on a car trip, you know, just, you know, poking and poking and not letting up.
And Jesus says that the man wakes up and gives him some bread, not because he was a friend, but because of his impudence, because of his stubbornness. Now, Jesus in this parable is not teaching us how to be a good neighbor. Yeah. He’s not teaching us good manners at all. In fact, maybe that’s part of the point, is that Jesus is teaching us that when it comes to prayer, this is not a matter of manners, it’s a matter of persistence, that the Lord wants us to keep, he wants us to keep asking, to keep petitioning, to keep coming to him and asking him for what we need.
So Jesus says, and he explains it further, he says, when you pray, ask, and seek and knock. And for whoever asks, it’ll be answered. And whoever seeks, they’ll find. And whoever knocks, the door will be open to him. Now, I used to think that that was kind of three ways that Jesus was teaching us about prayer. Kind of the same thing. Like prayer is asking, prayer is seeking, prayer is knocking.
But recently in our study of Genesis with Luther, we found out that Luther takes this a little different. It’s really quite beautiful. This is actually an order of things. That first we ask and then we seek and then we knock, and it goes like this: that first we ask the Lord for the things that we need. We pray and we ask the Lord, could you help me with this? Could you help my friend with this? Could you serve my neighbor with this? Could you bless my family with this?
Then we wait. If the Lord doesn’t answer, then we go to the second part, we seek, and that means we go back to the scriptures to make sure that we’re asking for the right thing. We ask the question, is this petition, is this prayer, is this thing that I’m asking to the Lord? Is it something that he, in fact, did promise? Lest we be found saying, but Dad, you promised. And he says, no, I didn’t actually promise that. So we seek in the scriptures to make sure that the thing that we’re asking for is the thing that God promised.
And then when we find it, when we find that promise from God in the Lord’s prayer or in the Psalms or in the lives of the fathers or the writings of the apostles, when we find that promise, we grab a hold of that promise and we keep asking. That’s the third part. That’s the knocking. Lord, you promised. Lord, here’s your word. And we take the word of the Lord and we speak it back to him.
It’s a marvelous thing that before the Lord’s prayer is our prayer to God. It’s God’s prayer to us, and he’s giving us the very words to say so that we can stand before him with this great boldness. And if the Lord hasn’t answered our prayers, then we just keep asking, keep praying, keep knocking, keep insisting. We are… impudent. We’re like Jacob who wouldn’t let go of the Lord’s ankle until he blessed him. We’re like the Syro-Phoenician woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer. This is what Jesus is asking of us in prayer and setting us to do.
And then he gives us this great, maybe the greatest promise of all, which I want us to think about now. He says, which of you, if your child asks for bread, is going to give him a scorpion? Or ask for an egg, and you’re going to give him a snake? You who are evil know how to give good gifts. How much more will your Father in heaven give to all who ask? And then Jesus gives this promise. He says, the Father will give the Spirit to all who ask.
Now, if there’s nothing else, if you leave here with nothing else, well, in fact, I’ll tell you my goal. I want you to leave with this promise: that God has given to each one of us this promise that he will give to us. He will give to you the Holy Spirit. He answers that prayer every time. If I have a goal for this sermon, it is that each and every one of us would, every single day, ask God in heaven to send to us the Holy Spirit. Send me your Spirit, O Lord. Send me your Spirit.
Now you say, but pastor, hold on. Why do we need to pray for the Holy Spirit? I actually have the Holy Spirit already. I believe you. But the Holy Spirit comes to us over and over in our lives and for, well, for lots of reasons, but I want to highlight three of them. I think the three most important works that the Holy Spirit does in our own lives are these:
Number one, he creates faith.
Number two, he brings forth fruits.
And number three, he gives his gifts.
Now first is the gift of faith. I cannot, by my own reason or strength, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him. Neither can you. It is the Holy Spirit who calls us by the gospel and enlightens us with his gifts. Paul says it like this: no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. And Jesus says, I will send the Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. So that it is the work of the Holy Spirit that you begin to believe, that you keep believing, and that you believe to the end. This is his work. It’s not yours. He works this through the Word.
So that you started to believe in Jesus, that is evidence that the Holy Spirit has done his work of convicting you of your own sin. In fact, the Holy Spirit teaches us these two things that we can otherwise not know at all. Namely, that we’re sinners in desperate need of the Lord’s mercy, that we’ve broken his law and deserved his wrath, and second, that we have his mercy by the death and resurrection of Jesus. And that we have a Savior who loves us and the forgiveness of all of our sins. You must know those two things, and you cannot know those two things unless the Holy Spirit gives them to you.
So that you have begun to believe, and that you still believe right now, and that you will believe when you’re breathing your last breath, this is all the work of the Holy Spirit. So we pray first that God would send His Holy Spirit to create faith in our hearts, repentance, and trust in His Word.
The second gift of the Holy Spirit is fruit. Paul lists the fruits of the Spirit for us in Galatians. The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So not only does the Holy Spirit give you faith to believe the Word of God, the Holy Spirit also gives you strength to begin to love and serve God and your neighbor.
Now this is important because the Lord asks quite a lot of us. Each one of us is called to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. All of us are called to love our neighbor as ourselves, and this is not easy. In fact, we could say to the Lord when he says, love your neighbor, we want to say, well, have you met my neighbor? That’s not so easy.
But here’s the promise. The Lord has not left you without comfort. He has not left you without aid. He’s not left you without help. Jesus says, I’m not going to leave you as orphans. I will send the Holy Spirit, the helper, who will help you to begin, not to completely do it, but to begin to keep my commandments, to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, to love your neighbor as yourself, to have joy in His gifts, even in the midst of suffering, to be patient in times of affliction and loss and grief, and all these fruits of the Spirit.
So I suppose that you could stop praying for the Holy Spirit if you had all of those fruits manifest in your life every day. You could just check, do I have the fullness of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control? Well, I’m praying for the Holy Spirit to help also with those things. This is the fruit that the Holy Spirit works in our lives. And he wants to do it.
I was thinking about this, especially last week when we were looking at Colossians 1. And there’s this little line in Colossians 1 where Paul’s talking about his ministry, and he says, we do all of these things by the energy of God. That’s the word that he uses there: the energy of God. So that the Lord is giving us his own energy, his own strength, his own wisdom to begin to do these things that he’s called us to do.
So the second work of the Spirit is the fruit. And the third work of the Spirit is the gifts of the Spirit. Now, the difference between the fruits of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit is this: that every single Christian has the fruits of the Spirit. The Lord is working in each and every one of us these things, love, joy, peace, patience, that whole list; all of us that’s being cultivated in every single one of us.
But the Holy Spirit also gives unique gifts to each one of us according to our different vocations and callings. This is also very important. So that all of us, for example, who are children… who have parents are commanded by God to honor our father and our mother. Now, that’s a big lift. That’s a big command. But here’s how we pray as children.
We pray, Lord, send me your Holy Spirit so that I can begin to honor my parents and obey them and serve them and do what they say and give them the respect that the commandment deserves. The same is true in all the vocations that the Lord gives us as family. Some of you, the Lord has called to be husbands, some of you wives. We pray, Lord, give me your Holy Spirit for the office of serving my spouse, for being faithful to the spouse that you’ve given to me.
If the Lord has called you to be parents, the same. Lord, give me your Spirit so that I could be a faithful father, a faithful mother, a faithful grandfather, a faithful grandmother. The Lord is giving us the Holy Spirit specifically to help with those gifts. And in various different ways, the Lord is giving us the gifts that we need for our various callings.
It’s certainly true of the office of the Word. If this whole business of preaching was up to me, I would have ruined it a long time ago. I have to pray, and you could pray for me too; I have to pray every day that the Lord would give me the Holy Spirit so that I could be faithful. That the words of my lips would reflect the Word of God, that I could bring to you all the promises of God so that you could believe and call upon him in faith, so that the Holy Spirit has to do the work of supporting the office that he’s given.
And the same thing is true for you. Pray, Lord, give me your Holy Spirit so that I could be a faithful hearer of your Word. Open my ears to hear the Word. Open my heart to receive the Word. Open my mind to understand the Word so that the Holy Spirit will help us in all of these different ways.
Now, this is our Christian life, of faith and of love and of service, and it is a high calling. But here today, we lean on this promise that the Holy Spirit, the helper, comes to all of us to strengthen and equip us for these works: for believing, for repenting, for trusting, for loving, for joy and compassion, and for service.
And it comes back to this promise. Jesus says, the Father will give the Holy Spirit to all who ask. So we ask our Heavenly Father, Dad, you promised. You promised us to send your Holy Spirit. Send him now to me. Help me to believe and love and pray and fight the devil and hold your Word and bless those around me.
And your Father in heaven hears that prayer. He loves to hear it. And every time he answers it, may God grant us his Holy Spirit and the joy that comes down from above. Amen.
Now may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.