I have been reading through the book of Luke with my high school Sunday school class these past few weeks. The focus of the class is on learning to read and apply the word of God to our lives and ultimately, to help them develop the daily habit of reading the Bible. We’ve been working through a plan which, by reading five chapters a week, will take us through the entirety of the New Testament in a year. In my last article I wrote about the Father’s heart for the nations and my journey with these students has only served to strengthen this idea.

While I am the teacher and working to help my students learn to read their Bibles, as usually happens when I read the living and active word of God, I’ve been challenged as well. God is challenging me to continue to deepen my prayer life. Last week it was Luke six and Jesus’ ‘night of prayer’. There is something about the Son of God finding it necessary to spend an entire night ‘praying to God’ (vs. 12) that caused a question to bubble up in my mind: if the Creator of the universe chose to spend an entire night in prayer, might it be reasonable to consider that I might need to spend a few hours in prayer on a more regular basis? That I don’t more naturally default to prayer in my everyday life belies some deeper reality about where I place my faith. Lord help me!

This week it was Luke 11. In this passage, Jesus has been asked by his disciples to teach them to pray. It seems he has modeled a life of prayer and now, in their own aha moment, they’ve decided to ask for deeper instruction. They too want to learn to live lives that default to prayer. In verses 2-4 Jesus gives them the outline for a basic structure of prayer we know as the ‘Lord’s Prayer.’ In Luke we find a pared down version of the prayer we find also in Jesus’ sermon on the mount in Matthew 6. In Luke 11 however, Jesus goes on to share a deeper teaching on prayer with his disciples using first a story, then an exhortation and then ending with an example. Jesus wants them to get it. He wants them to understand deep-down the heart attitude they should carry into prayer.

This brings us to ‘shameless audacity’. Luke 11:5-8 is a story of a man who has a friend suddenly show up at his door. He has no food to offer the customary hospitality required by his culture and so he heads out to another, nearby friend, to ask for three loaves of bread. It’s late. The friend has already put his children to bed and locked down the house for the night. He doesn’t want to get out of bed to help and says as much. In verse 8 Jesus says, “I tell you, even though he 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.” That is the NIV but it is translated similarly in the NASB (shamelessness), the ESV (impudence), the CSB (shameless boldness) and the NLT (persistence and boldness). Eugene Peterson spells it out a bit more in The Message—’if you stand your ground, knocking and waking all the neighbors’.

This story is followed by Jesus’ exhortation to ask . . . seek . . . knock. . . “Everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (vs. 10). Jesus draws the teaching to a close with the example of an earthly father giving good gifts to his kids compared to our Heavenly Father. Jesus seems focused on teaching his disciples, and us, to pray with confidence, to pray with urgency, and to pray with shameless audacity.

And this of course challenged me—do I pray like that? 

The Bible is filled to the brim with examples of people who prayed with the kind of shameless audacity Jesus is pointing to in Luke 11. Here are just a few:

• Abraham bargaining over Sodom (Genesis 18:22-33). Abraham stands before God and negotiates down from fifty righteous people to ten, saying things like "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" He essentially holds God to His own character, and he keeps pushing six times.
• Moses talking God out of destroying Israel (Exodus 32:9-14; Numbers 14). After the golden calf, Moses argues with God about His own reputation among the Egyptians and reminds Him of His promises to the patriarchs. The text says God "relented." Moses even says, "blot me out of your book" if God won't forgive the people (Exodus 32:32).
• Hannah's desperate prayer (1 Samuel 1). She prays so intensely, lips moving with no sound, that Eli the priest assumes she's drunk. She makes a bargain with God for a son and doesn't apologize for the intensity.
• Jesus' parables on persistence. Besides the teaching above, Jesus also shares about the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8) who badgers an unjust judge until she gets justice, and Jesus holds her up as a model of prayer.
• The Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:24-30; Matthew 15:21-28). Jesus tests her with what sounds like a harsh refusal, and she turns his own metaphor back on him: even the dogs eat the crumbs under the table. She is audacious and He commends her faith and grants her request.
• Blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46-52). The crowd tells him to be quiet, and he just keeps shouting louder and louder. Jesus stops for him and asks, “What do you want me to do for you?”

If Jesus tells us to ask, seek and knock and to do so with shameless audacity, and with so many examples in the Scriptures of the people of God doing just that, why do my prayers often seem so feeble? It may be that in personal requests we lack the confidence to ask audaciously for our own needs and desires. But we know God’s will is for the nations to worship Him, to see disciples made and churches established among every nation, tribe, people and language.

The man in Luke 11 wasn’t hungry. He was pounding on a neighbor’s door at midnight for the sake of a guest. That is the posture I want when I pray for the nations: not asking for my own comfort, but refusing to stay quiet while others go unfed or remain unreached.

And we aren’t twisting God’s arm. We’re asking for what he has already said he wants.

So this week, pick one unreached people group and pray for them by name each day. Ask for workers. Ask for churches. Ask until it feels almost embarrassing, and then keep asking.

Father, you promised that people from every nation, tribe and tongue would worship before your throne. We believe you. So we ask, boldly and without apology: send out workers, open hearts, and plant churches among the unreached. Do not let another generation pass without hearing your name. Amen.

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