Luke 11: Praying with Audacity That Doesn't Let Go

Introduction

KXC, King's Cross Church in London, is spending three weeks on the Lord's Prayer in a series called "Teach Us to Pray." The church is preparing for a season of vision, with a week of prayer and fasting, "not an obligation, just an invitation." After the prayer that dwells in the Father's love, Ruth May turns to the prayer that asks.

She begins by setting the tone: "This is a judgment-free zone." She has known seasons of long hours of intercession, and others when, even while working as a "professional Christian," prayer had become an afterthought, squeezed in before a difficult meeting or in the middle of a crisis. She invites everyone to set aside guilt, cynicism or boredom, and to ask humbly: "God, what do you want to say to me?"

"We have prayed for revival and we have seen glimpses of it. We have prayed for healing and we have seen moments when the miraculous broke in. [...] But there is more." She makes clear that she is preaching to herself as much as to the congregation.

Message Outline

1. "Lord, teach us to pray"

• In Matthew 6, in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says: "Pray like this." Ruth May divides the Lord's Prayer into three movements: abiding ("Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy"), asking ("Let your Kingdom come. Let your will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Give us this day our daily bread") and moving forward (forgiveness and deliverance from the evil one, the theme of the following week).
• In Luke, the Lord's Prayer is the answer to a request: "It happened, that when he finished praying in a certain place, one of his disciples said to him, 'Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples'" (Luke 11:1).
• What had they seen in Jesus' prayer to ask such a question? Ruth May describes those moments when you wonder whether you have time to slip out for a coffee before the end of the song, while the person across the aisle is overwhelmed with love and wonder. Or you have come to receive prayer, and someone at your feet is weeping uncontrollably while you are not sure you feel anything at all.
• "This is not about judgment or condemnation." She admits that she has sometimes been jealous of those who met God, sometimes judged them as too demonstrative, sometimes longed for their freedom: "I want what they have."
• She imagines the disciples as people like us, watching Jesus pray with curiosity, jealousy, judgment, or desperate longing. And Jesus, in his grace, answers them with an invitation into that same intimacy. Everything begins with "Father."
• The week before, Cath had suggested starting each day with a simple prayer: "Father, I belong to you. What do you want to say to me today?" Ruth May practiced it all week: some days it brought words of challenge, other days encouragement, comfort or direction.

2. Prayer really changes things

• Two things probably struck the disciples about Jesus' prayer life: the intimacy of his relationship with the Father, and the fact that "it seemed to work." He had a faith and a power they had never seen.
• Blaise Pascal wrote that God established prayer "to communicate to his creatures the dignity of causality." To be in relationship with our Creator is to receive that dignity: our prayers truly change things.
• Ruth May admits she does not know how it works, nor why it sometimes seems not to work. This message is not about the pain of unanswered prayer. She points to the messages already given on that subject at KXC, or to a conversation with the team for those who are hurting.
• A friend, on a chaplaincy placement in a ward for children with terminal cancer, was talking with a seven- or eight-year-old boy who had leukemia. The boy told him: "When I get to heaven, I'm going to ask God why I got cancer. And he'd better have a good answer. I'm going to punch him in the nose." For Ruth May, there is something wonderfully pure in that response: it says that something is wrong with the way things are.
• The very fact that Jesus tells us to pray "your kingdom come" and to keep on praying it says something important: the world today is not the way God wants it. One day, "He will wipe away from them every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more" (Revelation 21:4). "But for now, we pray. We stand in the gap."

3. Candles and prayers: the example of Leipzig

• Ruth May returns to a story she has told before. In communist East Germany, being a Christian could land you in prison. A pastor in Leipzig said to himself, "This is not how it should be," and began to pray.
• The prayer meeting, at first a handful of people, soon gathered thousands. According to the preacher's account, a prayer gathering for peace reached 120,000 people within a week. A few days later, the East German leader had to resign, within two weeks the movement drew 300,000 demonstrators, and within a month the Berlin Wall fell.
• Journalists and historians often see that gathering as the tipping point in the fall of East German communism. A communist official of the time confided to a journalist: "We were prepared for everything, except candles and prayers."
• "If even the communist leaders connected the fall of the Berlin Wall with the power of prayer, perhaps we should too."

4. Hannah: the prayer of desperation

• That week, the Lectio 365 prayer app was meditating on Hannah, a devout woman who could not have children. At the annual pilgrimage to Shiloh, "She was in bitterness of soul, and prayed to Yahweh, and wept sore" (1 Samuel 1:10). She prayed with such intensity that the priest Eli thought she was drunk.
• Once he understood, Eli blessed her: "Go in peace; and may the God of Israel grant your petition that you have asked of him" (1 Samuel 1:17). She later gave birth to Samuel, prophet and leader of Israel, who would one day anoint David as king.
• The author of the meditation wrote: "Weeping is a biblical way of praying." The Psalms, Jeremiah and Lamentations mingle tears and prayers. The God who sees the tears of the oppressed, who gathers our tears in his bottle (Psalm 56:8) and who promises to wipe away every tear, sees Hannah's tears and answers her prayer.
• Ruth May contrasts prayers of desperation with prayers of comfort. For believers living in great poverty, "thank you for this new day" is a prayer heavy with meaning, and "give us this day our daily bread" becomes a cry when you do not know where the next meal will come from.
• There will be moments, if not today then one day, when these prayers will be the only ones we have left: losing a job before the rent is due, a health scare, a loved one's diagnosis, anxiety that steals joy every day, grief that numbs like a blanket, the longing to break free from an addiction, fear of the future.

5. Prayer changes us too

• Prayer is not "worrying in God's direction." It is intimacy and relationship, and as we pray, we catch a glimpse of God's heart.
• Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century mystic, wrote: "Prayer unites the soul to God. [...] It is the witness that the soul wills what God wills. [...] He looks upon us with love and wants to make us partners in his good will and work. So he moves us to pray for what it pleases him to do." Prayer weaves us into the work God is already doing in the world.
• In her early twenties, in her first church job, Ruth May had to lead the Sunday prayers for the persecuted church. She did her research, read testimonies, fasted and prayed. One question gripped her: what if these persecuted Christians were my own brother or sister? How would I pray? What could I say to them in heaven?
• She was also thinking of the last verse of Phil Wickham's song "Beautiful," where the Bride, gathered on the shore of eternity, sings with one voice. When Sunday came, barely two lines in, she began to sob, unable to say her carefully prepared sentences. She even got the Lord's Prayer wrong.
• She stepped down from the platform embarrassed, but "something had connected in me": her first experience of the emotional reality of compassion, the first time her prayers reached her heart. "Following Jesus is not an intellectual religion built on self-discipline, knowledge of Scripture and determination to be a good person. It is a relationship."
• When we pray, we are not on neutral ground but on a battlefield. Many things compete for our heart: ourselves, our comfort, success. Prayer refocuses our gaze on God, until the One we pray to becomes greater than the mess and noise of the world. "It wasn't really about my prayers. It was about me, about God changing my heart."
• This prayer calls for surrender: "May your will be done, not mine, not my agenda, but yours, Lord" (see Luke 22:42). It reminds us that we are not in charge.

6. Intimate, whole-person, persevering

• Intimate. Everything flows from intimacy with the Father and from knowing his character.
• Emotional. Ruth May hesitated over this word and chose it because it disturbs. She does not necessarily mean tears or feelings, but an engagement of the whole person: heart, mind, body, soul, spirit and strength. She had considered the word "close": you have to be near something to be connected to it. When Pete Hughes intercedes, he stamps his feet, claps his hands, pounds on the wall. And praying with someone in despair is often messy: tears, words that make no sense, rage against injustice.
• Persevering. In Luke, the Lord's Prayer is immediately followed by the parable of the friend who knocks at midnight to borrow bread. The neighbor finally gets up because of his "shameless audacity" (Luke 11:8, in the English version Ruth May reads). "I love this idea of a prayer life full of shameless audacity."
• A few chapters later, the persistent widow gets justice from a judge who does not fear God, because she keeps coming back (Luke 18:1-8). Knowing God intimately, we can be boldly persistent and say to him: "God, this isn't right. Do something."
• Luke concludes: "I tell you, keep asking, and it will be given you. Keep seeking, and you will find. Keep knocking, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives. He who seeks finds. To him who knocks it will be opened" (Luke 11:9-10). "I'm not going to stop. I know your heart is in this, God."

7. Standing in the gap

• Ruth May concludes with Frank Lake, a clinical psychologist and pioneer of Christian pastoral care: "Whenever a man brings all his reactions to life as he has experienced it before God as he is revealed in Christ, demanding that the evil of the situation be reconciled with his goodness, he has begun to pray. [...] Prayer in this sense is not reciting prayers in a formal way. It is entering into an energetic dialogue with God about the whole of human experience, forgetting neither the misery of our own situations nor the redemptive misery of the cross of Christ."
• To intercede is to stand in the gap: on one side, the reality of the situation ("this is not normal, this is not how it should be"); on the other, the reality of the cross, the power of Christ crucified and risen. And to join the two together in prayer.
• At the time of response, she invited two groups to come forward: those carrying a despair they have never brought to God, or are bringing to him for the hundredth time, surrounded by a community that says, "I will hold up your arms when you are tired, I will give you faith when yours is empty"; and those God is calling to become intercessors, who say, "God, I will not stop until you have done it."

Key Takeaways

• The prayer that asks is born of intimacy with the Father: "Father, I belong to you. What do you want to say to me today?"
• Prayer really changes things: God gives his creatures "the dignity of causality."
• To pray "your kingdom come" is to recognize that the world is not the way God wants it, and to stand in the gap.
• Prayer changes us too: it unites us to God, lets us share his compassion and leads us to surrender our own will.
• Jesus invites us to bold perseverance, like the friend who knocks at midnight and the widow who keeps coming back to the judge.

Personal Application

1. What season of prayer are you in right now: long hours of intercession, or a last-minute prayer before a difficult meeting?
2. Is there a situation that fills you with despair and that you have never really brought to God, or have stopped bringing to him?
3. Can you start each day this week with this simple prayer: "Father, I belong to you. What do you want to say to me today?"
4. What is competing for your heart to the point of coming before Jesus: your comfort, your needs, your success?
5. For whom, or for what, is God calling you to stand in the gap with an audacity that does not let go?

Verses Cited

• Matthew 6:9-13
• Luke 11:1-13
• Luke 18:1-8
• 1 Samuel 1:9-20
• Psalm 56:8
• Revelation 21:4
• Luke 22:42

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the "asking prayer" in the Lord's Prayer?

For Ruth May, it is the part of the Lord's Prayer where we ask God to act with power: "Let your Kingdom come. Let your will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Give us this day our daily bread." It starts from intimacy with the Father and rests on a conviction: prayer really changes things, and it changes us too.

Why does Jesus tell the parable of the friend who knocks at midnight?

In Luke 11, this parable follows the Lord's Prayer immediately. The neighbor finally gets up because of his friend's insistence, which the English version Ruth May reads renders as "shameless audacity." She sees it as an invitation to pray with bold perseverance, grounded in knowing God's character.

Is it normal to cry when you pray?

Ruth May quotes a meditation saying that weeping is a biblical way of praying: Hannah, in 1 Samuel 1, pours out her soul before the Lord in tears. She does not make tears an obligation, but she invites us to a prayer that engages the whole person, heart, body and spirit, and that can be messy.