Boldness in Prayer
I was recently asked a very reasonable question. Why do we have the color green up right now. What does it stand for. And I could have answered that for any other color, but green was always just the default for me. We’re in ordinary time, which is not plain old ordinary time, but ordinary as in ordinal or numbered time. There are not a lot of church holidays at this time in the year. Each Sunday, or Saturday in our case is numbered. This Sunday is the Sunday unceremoniously known as Proper 12. A very happy Proper 12 to you today. Anyway, the color for ordinary time is green. But why it was green, I could not have said when it was asked. But I can now, and I’ll share it because it’s a beautiful thing, especially for our church in this new season we’re in. Because the green of ordinary time represents growth. What a wonderful time to plant a new church as we walk through the life of Jesus all the way into the coming of his Holy Spirit and now the expansion of the church to all nations. As the church expands into the world, this season of growth is also a time for our own spiritual lives to grow as we press in more and more to learn how to be Christians, to follow Jesus as our Lord and Savior. And our passages today help us do that with a special focus on boldness. Have you ever thought about boldness as a concept, as a trait that you or others might have?
When we think of boldness, we might think of daredevils, someone climbing to the top of a high-rise building without a net or, in a different kind of boldness, without a permit. Or people like Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who chose to speak truth to authoritarian power. Bonhoeffer, a theologian writing in the 30s and 40s against the Nazi party, even went so far as to plan an assassination attempt on Hitler. That’s bold. Boldness acts despite danger. And you see it all over the Bible. I think of Esther, approaching the king, which is a death sentence unless he reaches out his scepter and allows you to speak. I could see an introvert make that rule. We see boldness in Stephen’s speech against those who crucified Jesus and persecuted the church. And there we see the truth at play that what we say can cost us our relationships, our jobs, increasingly our freedoms, and sometimes it can cost us our life. But knowing this and speaking anyway is bold.
At the same time, we can say something to one person and it’s bold, but if we say it to someone else who we have a stronger relationship with, it’s not as bold, it’s totally fine. I’ll give an example. If you’re off to work and you say to your wife, “How about a kiss?” Unless there’s some major unresolved conflict, it’s a perfectly safe request. But if you’re on your way to work and you get pulled over and the officer asks for your license and registration and you reply, “How about a kiss?,” that’s bold, and more than a little reckless. So boldness depends on the strength and closeness of the relationship you have with the person you’re approaching.
What we see in our passages today is that whether we are speaking truth to power like Stephen or making a request of the Lord repeatedly like Abraham, our relationship with God and our trust in his promises encourages us to be bold in the faith.
And before we run too far with that, a couple of caveats. Boldness must flow from faith, our relationship with God. Some of us have boldness wired into our personality and just apply that to Christian stuff. And the results can ruin the witness of Christ in a community. Sometimes people can hone in on a particular promise of God and decide to be bold with it in a way it wasn’t intended and it ends up doing much more harm than good. It’s not bad to share Scripture with someone, but it’s much better to do that with someone there’s some kind of friendship with. Relationship makes boldness less offensive. And so boldness is the goal, not offensiveness. So, generally speaking, we don’t walk up to strangers and tell them that if they’ve ever told a lie, they are going to Hell, because it says so in Revelation 21:8. I mean, it is possible, that if rapport can be established, using outstanding acumen of tone and facial expression, that an extremely gifted evangelist could lead with that, but they would have to choose their conversation partner well and be filled and led by the Holy Spirit to avoid getting punched in the mouth, or worse, maligning the witness of Jesus and his church. So the message from our passages today has more layers than simply, “Be bold” or “Be careful with your words.” There’s a situational thing going on here. We see this in Proverbs as well. In Proverbs 26:4: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly.” Then Proverbs 26:5: (the very next verse) “Answer a fool according to his folly.” You can’t do both of these at the same time. You need faith, relationship with God, and wisdom to tell which one is right in a given situation. But we can’t be afraid of being bold as a category. Boldness is certainly a valid thing in the Christian life. That same Revelation 21:8 that condemns liars to hell apart from salvation in Jesus, also condemns cowards. As we mature in Christ, as we walk with the Holy Spirit, we gain wisdom, and get a sense for where to be bold, lovingly. So today we follow Paul’s admonition in our Colossians reading which says: “6 Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”
There are lots of ways to apply Paul’s teaching, here, but one way that Christians have always done this is by praying the Lord’s Prayer. There, Jesus invites us to be bold, to learn boldness in the context of love. We’ll look at the various parts of the prayer and hear some echoes of it in our Colossians passage.
Jesus teaches us to pray the Lord’s prayer, here in Luke, and more fully in Matthew, with the last part added by the early Christians for use in a church service. But he teaches us to pray, first acknowledging God as he is: As a loving Father to us and other Christians. Approaching God at all is bold. But we approach God with other Christians, not with the boldness of strangers, but with a boldness like little children asking parents to get up early on a Saturday and take them to go buy donuts. Because God is our loving Father, we pray “Our Father.”
The rest of the requests in the Lord’s prayer are made possible by the kingdom of God, the rule and reign of God invading earth, even through the hearts of his believers and in authority over the spiritual and physical aspects of life on earth. As Paul says in verse 9 of our Colossians passage today: “9 For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10 and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.” So we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
And living as citizens of heaven in a foreign land, we ask for our Father to provide for our needs through his kingly reign, to meet our daily needs for physical and spiritual sustenance. So we pray “Give us this day our daily bread.”
We pray Jesus’s prayer to wear the mark of citizens of heaven as forgiven people who also forgive and to keep our hearts fixed on God, not on the things of this world. As Paul says in verse 13: “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” And elsewhere John says that “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” We’re to be characterized as forgiving people. Our passport, our proof of citizenship is our forgiveness of others. And so we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
We pray Jesus’s prayer to keep our identity in heaven as we walk the earth, for protection from other spiritual forces and other things that would derail our citizenship in heaven if they could. As Paul puts it in Colossians 2:15 “15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.” And the psalmist says: “I give you thanks, O Lord, with my whole heart; before the gods I sing your praise.” And so we pray, “and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
Jesus himself gives us this bold prayer of Christian identity to pray, whenever we pray. The disciples had asked Jesus to teach them how to pray so he gives them the Lord’s prayer and with it a parable about boldness. Even if we ask God in the middle of the night to meet our needs, we aren’t going to offend him. In fact we’re encouraged to ask continually, beyond reason. It seems that we can almost nag God, and it’s fine. Though nagging lacks gratefulness and relationship. Nagging is often seeing the person you’re asking as an obstacle and uses the relationship with the person being nagged as a means to an end. And that’s not what we’re supposed to be doing in prayer. No, but we can ask over and over if we must and we will receive an answer. Sometimes the answer is that we get what we ask for. Sometimes the answer is that we’re not asking for something that will be good for us. And that can be anything. Tim Keller tells us that God gives us what is absolutely the best for us, knowing everything that God knows. Sometimes our health is not the best thing for us. Sometimes our job is not the best thing for us. Sometimes what is best for other people in our lives is not the best thing for us. God knows, and sometimes only God knows, and we need to trust him. God does move mountains for us through prayer. And he sometimes moves us around the mountains. Sometimes what is best for us is to be faithful in the face of things not going how we would choose them to go and trusting God that he knows what he’s doing. But what he doesn’t encourage us to do is to stop asking. Through prayer, our eyes can be opened so that we learn to refine our petitions. But ultimately, for our wills to be sanctified, to align our wills with God, we should ask for the Holy Spirit. Look at our Gospel from Luke, chapter 11, verse 11:
11 What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; 12 or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 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!”
Since God does sometimes answer prayers for a fish or an egg, Jesus isn’t saying that God never gives us what we ask for, and only gives the Holy Spirit instead. But we should ask for him to give us the Holy Spirit, so that we are even more thankful when he provides what we ask, and when he doesn’t, we can refine what we ask for and have strength to be faithful and trust him to open the door for what will ultimately be best for us, and for a changed heart that gives him glory even in our times of incompleteness and falling short. Because with the Holy Spirit present in our lives, we aren’t incomplete any longer. Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth, and part of what that means is that we can see that the Lord is trustworthy, that while there is more to life than money and things, he does provide for our needs, and he is faithful when more important losses are felt and experienced. With the help of the Holy Spirit, we can see his promises as true, that objective justice will be carried out by the good Judge, that we will rise to new life with him, that he will wipe away every tear, that pain and sorrow will be taken away forever in the new heavens and new earth, a place he’s preparing for us right now. So in this church season of growth, let’s ask for the Holy Spirit to be with us, to lead us into all truth, to make us resilient in the faith, to see and value Jesus for who he is, and on the last day lead us into the infinitely good place he’s preparing. Let us be bold in prayer, this night and always.
