Sunday, we continue our journey through the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 and Luke 11. Our Community Groups are doing studies in conjunction with my message from “The Prayer Course”. You can watch those videos through our Right Now Media account – you can access that through the button in our church newsletter / bulletin.

This week we will look at “Give us each day our daily bread” – Petition. In our community groups this week we learned that our prayers need to be relational not transactional. Prayer primarily needs to be coming to God in relationship for the purpose of strengthening that relationship. But, just as in a parent child relationship, our relationship with the Father includes asking him to do things for us. We call that “petition.” It is clear from the Lord’s prayer that God wants us to come to him with any and all needs we have. 

After the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11:5-13 Jesus tells a parable about an impertinent man who shamelessly wakes his neighbor up in the middle of the night to ask for some bread. He doesn’t just ask once, he asks repeatedly until he gets what he needs. On Sunday we will look at that parable as an illustration of how he should think of coming to God with our petitions. Included in Jesus teaching with the parable is the famous admonition for us to ask, seek and knock as part of an effective prayer life. The tense of those verbs is present tense which makes them a continuous practice. Petitioning is something we are to do continuously as part of a healthy prayer life. Join me this Sunday as we continue through the Lord’s Prayer.