NOTES for Luk 11:1-10

The disciples' question to Jesus about prayer was quite traditional in Gospel times. In that age, learned rabbis and teachers of the Torah generally devoted much attention to prayer and prescribed prayer rules: their length, form, and content. Proper prayer was considered the foundation of a person's entire relationship with God; words were given an almost independent significance within that relationship. It did not, of course, amount to outright magic, but there was more than enough formalism in the prescriptions governing prayer. Jesus, meanwhile, offers His disciples a short prayer of extraordinary spiritual depth.

Every word, every petition here is filled with profound meaning. Over two thousand years of Christian history, so much has been written about each that a whole human lifetime would probably not suffice to study these commentaries on the Lord's Prayer alone. But it is not, of course, merely a matter of what we would now call the theological richness of the short prayer Jesus offers His disciples. Above all, it is a matter of prayer's spiritual quality. It is no accident that the Savior gives the example of someone asking a friend for help: God is precisely a friend to us, and a friend who realizes that the matter is serious will not refuse to help.

For the friend to realize this, however, the request must be persistent and unrelenting. Someone who turns to God without fully believing that they will receive what they ask for will most likely receive nothing. Not because God hears such a person less well than a persistent one, but because persistence here is nothing other than an expression of the depth and intensity of the relationship binding the petitioner to God, and of the depth of their trust in Him. Without these, there can be no relationship with God, and turning to Him is futile.