Pray Effectively
- Ashland Church of Christ
- Mar 23
- 16 min read
Guest Pastor Rick Cunningham (1C)
March 23, 2025
'Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.” And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” '
Luke 11:1-13
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My name is Rick Cunningham, I served over at 1C in Jacksonville, I've been there for 40 years. Before that I was in Illinois. So my wife and I have been married for 28 years.
We have two girls, and one of the things that I've noticed as I reflect back on my own life is 28 years of marriage is pretty impressive. We've all come from families that have their parents, and as I started looking back into that and seeing what makes an effective marriage, it really comes down to communication. It's when we look at our grandparents, they communicate.
My parents were off communicating with each other, they were doing things with each other. My wife and I, we communicate. So it's the same thing in the Christian life.
We have a relationship with God. When we come and we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, the Holy Spirit is enthralling inside of us, and we establish a relationship with our Creator, God. And that relationship, the effectiveness of it, is really determined by, in fact, what we're going to look at, and what's amazing about this is that Luke spends a good deal of his book, in fact when you go to the New Testament, which is by far the biggest percentage out of all the Gospels.
When you go into just the Gospels alone, you look at Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and you look at all the prayers of Jesus, Luke has seven of them, but prayer is a big part. And so we're going to dive into this topic of prayer today. And I know as Christians, sometimes we sit there and we think, where do I want to be? You know, this is an awkward thing to do when we start, and it can still be challenging and daunting.
So we're going to go through, and we're going to dive into what Luke has to say, and as we do this, there's a catchphrase I want us to remember. If there's nothing else that you remember today, it is that effective Christians pray effectively. So what we're going to do is we're going to dive into Luke and ask, how is it that we pray effectively? So follow along with me.
Luke says, starting in verse 20, he says, Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples. And he said to them, When you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins.
For we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us, and lead us not into temptation. And he said to them, Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him, and he will answer from within. Don't bother me.
The door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything. I tell you, though, he will not get up and give them anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence, he will rise and give them whatever he needs.
And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds. And to the one who knocks, it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asked for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent? Or if he asked for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? So this morning, we're going to dive into this.
How do we pray effectively? If we're going to be effective Christians that follow Christ, we have to pray effectively. And the first thing that the text says is, starting in verses 2 through 4, where Jesus talks about the Lord's Prayer, and it's all about surrender. If we are to pray effectively, we must surrender ourselves to God in prayer.
So many of us have been around the church. Some of us may not. And for some, we've heard the Lord's Prayer.
Maybe we've memorized the Lord's Prayer. But yet Jesus hears, asked by his disciples, Lord, teach us to pray. There was something different about Jesus' prayer life that stood out to his disciples.
They were raised in the chapel of the temple. They grew up knowing how to pray, but yet their prayer wasn't like Jesus' prayer. And the disciple who asked Jesus, he noticed that John the Baptist had taught his disciples how to pray.
There was something that was happening. There was something that was powerful, I would have to imagine, about Jesus' prayer. There was something that was personal.
There was something that drew that disciple to say, what Jesus is doing, I'm not getting through the way I was taught. And so Jesus starts up, and he gives us the Lord's Prayer. And when you start breaking down the Lord's Prayer, you'll notice it's all about surrender.
In fact, Christian counselor, Paul Trey, this is one of the observations that he said, is he said, when you break it all down, the Lord's Prayer boils down to one element, and it is surrender. In fact, if you take, if you look at the words that communicate this, it starts first with your kingdom. Give us, forgive us, and lead us.
So, your kingdom, right away Jesus is saying, prayer is not about us, it's not about my kingdom, it's not about my wants, it's not about my desires. Right away we are confronted with that we are living for, so we come and we have to surrender ourselves to his agenda and his kingdom, which is all about following Jesus, learning how to live as a disciple in a world that does not follow Christ. So, Jesus begins by telling his disciple, you need to give and pray for God's kingdom in your life.
Now for us, that can take many different forms. Your kingdom, what is it that you desire me to do with my money, my time, what is it that scripture calls me to do to be obedient to you, to live in your kingdom, to seek first your kingdom in my life. The words that I say, the interactions that I have, how is it that I can share my faith with those around me, how can I live my life in such a way that it points people towards Christ without pushing people.
It's all about God's kingdom. We are called to participate in his kingdom, and Jesus points that out to the disciples as he begins to teach them about prayer. He says, it's God's kingdom that we need to pursue.
The second word here that he gives, he says, give us each day our daily bread. So, the second day is really about provision. If we are to surrender ourselves before God, we need to acknowledge that God is the one who provides.
He is the sole source of provision, and I like the kingdom of your name, I'm sorry. Kermel times when there's sicknesses and bills that are coming in, it is God who is our provider.
So, the whole focus of what the Lord's Prayer is doing is pushing it off of me and placing it upon God, and recognizing that it is God who is the one who provides. If we are to surrender ourselves before God, the third thing he says here is, forgive us. Forgive us of our sins as we forgive those who stand against us.
I was just listening to a podcast, and they were talking about how in the church, we've lost the sense of confession. That confession is not the normal part of the church service anymore. And yet, it's such an important part of the church service, because, I don't know about you, but I can't get through the day without having sin in my life.
It's always coming up. There's always things that, whether it's my thoughts, whether it's my intentions, whether it's what my heart is drawn towards, whether it's things that I say to my wife or my kids. I mean, I'm constantly struggling with this, and Jesus is telling his disciples that we need to surrender to God through asking for forgiveness, but also forgiving those who have hurt us.
If we are to be effective Christians who pray effectively, we have to forgive those around us, no matter who has hurt us or how they've been hurt. I can't understand it. I get it.
There's anger. Many of us, we hold onto grudges. But yet, Jesus is telling his disciples, it has to be let go.
God has forgiven us. We need to forgive those around us. And when we do, what we find is that our prayer life becomes incredibly effective at that point, and our walk with it.
And then he goes on, lastly, he says here, lead us not into temptation. So, again, it's this whole idea of God leading. So we have God's kingdom that we're pursuing.
We have God's provision in our life. We have our sin that separates us from God, that we are not in, so that we can stay in that relationship with God. And now he's saying for God to lead us out of temptation.
God can put up the safeguards in our lives so that we cannot, will not get distracted and turn away from Christ, so that we can follow Christ more effectively. When I looked at my own life, I was, there was a time when I was teaching, and I saw this whole idea of surrender. And it really kind of stood out to me, and it happened at a cross-country race.
I was watching some students of mine who were running, and when I was there, it wasn't the students that I had that caught my attention. It was one boy, and he was running, and what stood out was that he was blind. Have you ever seen a blind kid run a cross-country race? That's very difficult to do.
But what got me is how it was done. The coach, who was actually one of my co-workers, he was there right alongside this kid, and he had a rope, and he was leading this kid through that cross-country course. The student who was blind was completely surrendered to his coach.
He was trusting his coach to get him through the obstacles, to avoid the things that may trip him up, so that he could finish the race. So Jesus here is kind of doing the same thing with the disciples, and when it comes to the Lord's Prayer, it's all about surrender. It's us letting go, and grabbing onto God, and letting God lead us.
If we are to live an effective Christian life, God has to be leading us, and we do that through prayer. The second thing that we see in this text that stands out is that if we are to pray, if we are to be effective in prayer, that we need to be persistent. Notice what it says in verse 5. It says, And he said to them, Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, Friend, throw me three bones, for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to settle for him.
And he will answer from within, Do not bother me. The door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything.
I tell you, though, that he will not get up and give you, give him anything, because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence, he will rise and give him whatever. I read this in my life. Every time I come across this section of Scripture.
As Jesus is teaching his disciples on how to pray. He's talking already about surrender. Now he's talking about persistence.
And when I read this, what comes to mind is my kids, when they were little, asking over and over and over and over again. What I see as a negative, God sees as a positive. I mean, it's amazing.
We sit there and we tell our kids to stop, and yet God is telling us, No, keep asking. In fact, with the point of what he's talking about here, when he gives the illustration of a man and his friend, it's not because of the guy being his friend that he's going to get out of bed. It's because of the fact that he keeps knocking on the door.
He gets up and he gives him what he needs. And so it's the same thing with us. There is a persistence that has to happen in prayer.
Oftentimes, in the church, I think of when I was growing up, we talk about prayer. You get up in the morning, you pray. You eat lunch, you pray.
You go to bed, you pray. We only pray three times a day. That's how it was.
That's what I was taught. There are times that you pray. But that's not what this text is saying.
This text isn't saying that there are times that you pray. No, it's saying that we persistently pray. We continually come before God and ask and ask and ask.
We're like that kid in the back of the car. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? We keep asking God for something. I think that's a real thing, right? So it's the same that when Jesus is getting up here to pray, it's not just waking up in the morning and praying.
There's not seven kinds of prayer in Christian life. There is one that's continual prayer. Paul says, pray without ceasing.
And we sit there and we think about that and we say, we can't do this. This is impossible. But yet, we can.
One of the things that I was reading a book and a guy talks about, just different ways in how we pray to God. There are ways that, you know, things with more prayer, prayers around, or we can pray the Psalms. In this case, it's about prayer to Christ.
And it's something that is easy to incorporate in our life. And what it is, it's just a continual conversation with God throughout the day. It's when you are walking through the day and you see something or you encounter something that you need God's help.
Instead of sitting there focusing on talking to somebody else, you sit there and you talk to God. Lord, help me in this conversation that I'm about to have with this person. Lord, thank you for the provision that you just gave me, Lord.
It's a text you received from me. But incorporating God in all aspects of your day. Because God's there.
He wants to hear from you. And it's not hard to just sit there, whether it's in your mind or just under your breath and say, Okay, Lord, here I am. I need your help in this area right now.
Lord, this person is good to me. I want to say something to them. There is a persistent prayer that brings effectiveness to a Christian life.
My daughter, she lives, I've got two daughters. One in Kentucky, one in Missouri. And the beauty of this is that we are very close.
My wife and I are very close with our kids. Even though they are great distances away. And I'm not a big proponent of technology.
In fact, my daughter's text, we have a group text. It's called, it's called Quark. It's family, what is it? Family sarcasm rescue team.
I don't know. My youngest daughter, she's got a great sense of humor. She came up with this.
So, we sit there and we text throughout the day. We're constantly communicating, right? My oldest daughter works in the equine industry, and so she's always constantly texting us pictures of these horses that she's working with. My youngest daughter's constantly texting about whether it's a problem in her apartment or just things that she had for lunch at the college that she goes to.
We are constantly in communication. There's a persistence that is there. That persistence builds the relationship.
And what Jesus is getting at here with his disciples is that persistence is what we need in our life to build that relationship with God. So, if we are going to live effective Christian lives, we need to pray effectively. Surrender and persistence.
And the last thing that Jesus says is that we need to ask for the Holy Spirit in prayer. He says here in 1st Timothy. He says, and I tell you, ask and it will be given to you.
Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds.
And to the one who knocks, it will be opened. What bother among you if his son asks for a fish? Well, instead of a fish, give him a serpent. Or if he asks for an egg, we'll give him scorpions.
If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? Jesus knows the importance of the role of the Holy Spirit in our life. If we are going to have an effective prayer life, we need the Holy Spirit. So, many times when people read this passage, they just stop short of what the intent of the passage is, of going all the way to the end.
They just get to verses 9 and 10. Ask, seek, knock. And we think, it's a one chapter.
I can ask God whatever he's going to give me, but it doesn't work that way. Let me be honest. How many of you have ever asked God to give you a million dollars? And it never happened? It didn't in my life.
So, does it mean that what Jesus is saying here is not true? Not at all. It's that we just didn't understand the context. Jesus gets down to the point of this is that he's asking us to seek God for the Spirit in our life.
As we come into faith in Christ, the Holy Spirit indwells within us. God imparts himself inside of us. He is there to lead us.
He wants to lead us. He wants to have control. The purpose in our life, or the Spirit's purpose in our life, is to conform us in the image of Jesus so that we look more like Christ and less like us.
You guys ever sing that song by Zach Williams, A Little More Like Jesus, A Little Less Like Me? Yeah. Those are words that really communicate a heartbeat of God. If we were to live an effective Christian life, we can't do it without the Holy Spirit in our life.
The Spirit is the one who changes and transforms us. It is the Spirit who gives us the power. When you think about what the disciples saw when Jesus was praying, Jesus is God incarnate.
He is God in human flesh. They see the fullness of God. Father, Son, and Spirit.
They see the power of God displayed in Christ. They see the surrender and the sustenance of God in his life. They see the personality and the personableness of prayer in Christ's life.
It is that same thing that God wants to give us, and he does that through the Spirit. We need to be asking for the Holy Spirit in our life. We need to be seeking God and knocking and saying, Lord, show me.
Lord, may your Spirit lead me. Lord, may your Spirit guide me. God promises that as we do that, he will be true with that.
One of the things, again, cell phones. They're great illustrations. My love-hate relationship with the cell phone is that I love texting.
I don't like the fact that my cell phone knocks. There's a lot of times when I leave my cell phone and it's just not going to work, because it doesn't have the battery, right? It's the same. When I plug the cell phone in, it has constant charges in its existence.
That cell phone can work for hours, but it's plugged into a power source. The Holy Spirit is that power source of our life. We need to be consistently plugged in to the Spirit of God to live the Christian life.
How are we going to go through our culture if we don't have the Spirit of God in our life? How are we as Christians going to honor Christ with how we live, and how are we going to surrender ourselves to what Christ is calling us to, giving us the power to do? We cannot live an effective Christian life without the Spirit of God leading us. So this morning, in closing, Professor Doug Sweeney at one of the universities I went to, he said that Christians have long struggled to pray. He said that this is really an astounding privilege, and far too often neglected or taken for granted.
We live as if what we profess about God is just not true. And we don't want to be known as a people like that. I don't want to be known as such.
Prayer needs to be an essential part of our lives. Prayer is that lifeline between us and God to live an effective life. So there are three ingredients to effective prayer.
The first is surrender. The second is persistence. And the third is to ask for the Holy Spirit in prayer.
It is here that Pilgrim Graham says, Prayer is a rope that pulls God and man together. But it does not pull God, it pulls us together. Lord, we come and we thank you for this time.
We want to pray that we would be a people with prayer. Lord, it's more than just coming together as a church, but it exists day to day in our own life, when we are alone with youth, when we are working throughout the day, when we are having time with our family. Whatever it is that we are doing, Lord, we ask that you help us become more.
Help us to live a life that seeks you. And Lord, the cross that comes, I ask for your spirit to help us to do it. We thank you for this day.
Jesus, we thank you.
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