It’s hard to keep Praying

The parable in Luke 18 looks like Jesus is encouraging us to nag God. In fact he is trying to instil a bit of confidence into our prayer life. He says, ‘if even a corrupt judge can give justice merely to end the nagging, how much more certain is the outcome if the Judge hearing your prayer is on your side and loves justice!’ Jesus is encouraging us to not give up on prayer but to trust God to respond. But he leaves a little question at the end that you can’t help but take personally … “But will the Son of Man find faith on earth when he comes?”

Prayer often looks like a collection of requests to help out our loved ones, but Jesus has something bigger in mind when he thinks about prayer.

Jesus invites us to a very different sort of prayer. It’s been right under our noses all this time, hidden in plain sight. It’s found in the Lord’s prayer and recited by a billion people every week…

“Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Mt 6:10

Most of the prayers we pray for others are a reaction to something that has gone wrong that we want made right. Jesus invites us to pray for the good thing that does not yet exist!

This beautiful Kingdom of God that Jesus keeps talking about where the prisoners are set free, the poor have good news preached to them, the last in society will be first, and the greatest is the one who serves the most, and everyone gets bread every day; he wants us to pray for its arrival here in the Greensborough region. Faith/trust is the only currency, hope flies in the face of the selfish world, and love without boundaries expands our horizons!

Many people just write off this bit of the Lord’s Prayer as merely a wistful yearning for Jesus’ return at the end of time to set things right but Jesus always preached that the Kingdom is arriving and has begun here and now “among us”. The Kingdom comes where people receive Christ as their King and “where 2 or 3 are gathered in his name”. It starts as “small as a mustard seed” but with your prayer grows into “the most widespread of all trees”.

Jesus invites you to dream with him about what Greensborough would look like if the Kingdom took root and grew here and then to pray for that. This is what a Kingdom Prayer is.

To dream like Martin Luther King did about what the USA would look like if all the different racial backgrounds got on and then to ask God for that in prayer. To dream of a world that halves abject poverty by 2015 became the prayer of those Christians who took up the Micah Challenge. To dream of kids from struggling backgrounds having someone to care for them from church communities became the prayer of World Vision’s Kid’s Hope.

Kingdom Prayers are passionate because they inspire us to pray beyond our own small lives. These prayers are expectant because they come with a greater certainty of being answered; this is because we are aware that they are more in line with God’s will than what we usually pray for. These prayers are usually prayed together with others of like mind in churches, workplaces and homes.

At Living Faith Church, Adrian and Graeme are looking for people to join us to pray Kingdom Prayers for the community and for the church on every third Tuesday night. (That’s 19 October this week!) If you are interested then just turn up at 8pm for 90 minutes that will change the world… Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Graeme H