Persistent Prayer: Pounding Down the Door

Last night at IMPACT, we looked at a modern spin on the parable of the friend at midnight from the "36 Parables" series clip titled "Out of Reach". I won't go into detail on it, but you can check it out here if you'd like: http://www.36parables.com.

Anyway, when we read through the parable (Luke 11:5-8, NLT), something caught me that I hadn't thought about in a couple years. Read what it says really quick...

5 Then, teaching them more about prayer, [Jesus] used this story: “Suppose you went to a friend’s house at midnight, wanting to borrow three loaves of bread. You say to him, 6 ‘A friend of mine has just arrived for a visit, and I have nothing for him to eat.’ 7 And suppose he calls out from his bedroom, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is locked for the night, and my family and I are all in bed. I can’t help you.’ 8 But I tell you this—though he won’t do it for friendship’s sake, if you keep knocking long enough, he will get up and give you whatever you need because of your shameless persistence.

So often I've seen pastors focus in on the "Ask, Seek, Knock" verses immediately following this passage. But these verses grabbed me this time around. I thought that if I was the guy woken up in the middle of the night, I would surely get up (even as groggy and annoyed as I might be) and help the person in need. Then I realized that we're not supposed to put ourselves in the place of the homeowner; in this story, we're the ones pounding on the door in the middle of the night! God is the homeowner, and the friend back at our house waiting for some bread to eat represents the people we're reaching out to and loving for Jesus' sake.

Now I know that's not rocket science, but what's interesting is the lengths we're supposed to go to in order to get an answer at the door. "Shameless persistence" doesn't mean knocking a time or two and moving on. It means pounding on the door so hard that the hinges are about to rip away from the door frame. It means yelling at the top of our voices until we're hoarse trying to wake the homeowner up, unafraid of being seen as a jerk, being perceived as needy or making a fool out of ourselves.

But what makes us the persistent, shameless door knockers Jesus is calling us to be? Simple: knowing that we're doing the right thing. It's easier to be persistent with something when we have no doubt that it needs to be done. If a friend is injured at camp, we'll sprint our guts out to get to the nurses' station for help, even if it means searching the whole camp to find her. If a child is trapped in a burning building, we'll climb every fire escape, break every window out and scream our heads off for someone to call 911. Why the urgency? Because we're sold out on the fact that what we're doing is more important than anything else at that moment.

So we have to ask ourselves: are we making a habit of pounding God's door down? The friend in the story was bound and determined to get his hands on some bread, because it's what his guest needed most. When we see needs in our students and their families that we aren't able to meet, are we pouring our guts out to God on their behalf? Are we setting time aside to lay it all out there before the God who understands our needs better than we do? Even if we're not asking for exactly the right thing, isn't he bound to show us that and provide us with what we REALLY need?

Grab your calendar, day planner, cell phone, or whatever keeps your schedule, and add "DOOR POUNDING" at least 2-3 times next week. This weekend, ask God to give you his eyes to see the needs of your students & their families...and then pound down God's door for them Monday morning.