8.30-Does Jesus teach shamelessness in praying?

8.30-

Most people don’t enjoy reading books for hours on end. I certainly didn’t for the first part of my life. Mrs. Hembree, my Fannindel High School English teacher, has been mentioned a few times in my Facebook posts. She required that all her students be challenged to be the best they could be in English. I was a farm kid that loved to play and have fun, but I was not that interested in academics and working hard in the thought life of reading good books.

I thought I would be a farmer or later I thought I would be a business man, grocer or teacher/coach. I didn’t like reading books that much.

Prior to my vocation as a minister I was a public school teacher and coach. I was forced to study hard in the books in order to make the subject exciting or me and my students.

Many public schools have various electives they can offer and BHISD, Boles Home ISD, offered “Bible” to a bunch of high school boys. I was only 22 years old and some of my students were 18. They were a fairly rowdy bunch of guys. I had the challenge of helping them love studying important books and especially, the world’s best seller, the Bible. The result was that I studied hard every night to love this book and to find a way to tell the stories from it in ways that were exciting, relevant, practical and down to earth. I am not sure they fell in love with books and especially “The Book of all Books, The Bible”. I am sure that I fell in love with this book.

One of the advantages to deep study within a field is that we can dig down into the material and find gems of precious joy to our hearts that are not easy to see on the surface of things. This is the case with a verse from Jesus teaching in Luke 11.

Luke 11.
8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his [f]persistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs.
The one word is the word translated, “Persistence”.

The best translation in my opinion is from the Amplified Translation, “shameless persistence and insistence.”

When it comes to prayer, according to Jesus, you need to pray a simple, focused, short and relevant prayer and pray for what you need and want with persistence. Keep asking, seeking and knocking.
Out of the box prayer as taught by Jesus is very different from the religious leaders of his day. They were shamefaced, reverent prayers, but their lives were shameless and irreverent.

He taught them to be shameless and irreverent their prayers. Then live the life away from the prayer in a spiritually alert and reverent way. This is was out of the box thinking on prayer.

Larry Wishard
8.24.19