Reflection on Luke 11:1-13
Someone was praying, and he said, "Lord, give me patience. But please hurry!" That is a glaring example of just how NOT to pray. From today's Gospel passage, we gather that patience or perseverance is one of the essential attributes of prayer. If we lack it when we pray, then we just don't know how to pray. Two other attributes of prayer are faith and "right intention.”
When we pray, we must have faith that God will answer us. First, we must believe that God is able to do what we are asking. Then, we must also believe that he is willing to do it for us; that is, he cares enough, he has our interest enough to do it for us. The basis of this faith can be seen in the words of Jesus in today's Gospel passage: "Ask, and it will be given to you .... For the one who asks always receives." Jesus did not say, "Ask, and it may be given to you." What he said was, "Ask, and it will be given to you.” He did not say, "The one who asks sometimes receives." No! He said, "The one who asks always receives:' Jesus was not given to making frivolous promises, promises that he could not or would not deliver on. That is why we have to be convinced that if he said so, then it had to be so. That is why we can and we must pray with faith.
But what we are praying for must be for our own or our neighbour's good. That is where "right intention" comes in. If what I am praying for is not for my own or my neighbour's good, God will not do it for me. He will substitute something that is good for me or the neighbour that I am praying for. Yes, no responsible father would hand his son a stone when he asked for bread, or hand him a snake instead of a fish or a scorpion instead of an. egg. But what responsible father would hand his son a stone if he asked for one, when what he really needed was bread? What responsible father would hand his son a snake or a scorpion even if he asked for either of them? In the same way, God cannot be expected to give us anything that would turn out to be a stone or a snake or a scorpion in our hands, even if we asked him.
Having taken care of faith and "right intention", the next attribute that we must bring to our prayers is patience or perseverance. God is absolutely sovereign. He does not take orders from us. He will do what we ask for in prayer in his own time, not our time. Don't we all say that God's time is the best? How come we don't seem to believe that when it comes to prayer?
The trouble may be with the way things are in our world today. We have gone well past jet age and space age into cyber age. We seem to be able to do a lot of things at the touch of a button. As a result, many of us have lost the attribute of patience. If something we want fails to materialise at the time we expect it, we give up. We stop trying. We say, "It's no use. We are just wasting our time." A well known adage in days gone by used to be, "If once you try and you don't succeed, try, try, try again." It would seem that many of us today have settled for a modern corruption of that adage, which says, "If once you try and you don’t succeed, don't be a fool; give up!"
That is not the right attitude to bring to prayer. That is the lesson of today's gospel passage for us. When we pray, it is we who must wait on the Lord, and not the other way round. We cannot give God any ultimatums or deadlines to do what we want, or else .... That is what we are doing if we lack patience or perseverance when we pray.
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