JUST SO? HOW MUCH MORE!
A sermon on LUKE chapter 11 verses 1-13
How the leopard got its spots, How the camel got its hump, How the rhinocerous got its skin. Rudyard Kipling’s “Just so” stories first published in 1902 but probably still remembered and loved from our childhood by us oldies.
But I’ve got some new ones for all of us: How God never had a hump etc and I call these the “How much more”stories. Kipling’s tales were bedtime stories for his daughter Effie and were meant to send her off to sleep. My series were told by Jesus of Nazareth and you are not supposed to nod off!
Who on earth – what human parent - would give their own child a snake when the child asked for a fish? Or a scorpion, when the child asked for an egg? So, Jesus says, if you with all your faults know how to give the right things to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him.
Then there was the man who started banging on his friend’s door at midnight asking for a loan of three loaves. Don’t disturb me, the friend calls out, my children are asleep and I’ve gone to bed myself. But in the end, says Jesus, he will be forced to get up if the banging goes on long enough. So I say to you: ask and it will be given you; seek and you will find.
In other words, “how much more” readily your heavenly father will open the door to you than the man who had locked up for the night. And there are stories in the series.
In every case it’s a dramatic comparison between the human and the divine. Every case is designed to show HOW MUCH MORE generously God will treat us than our fellow human beings do.
Now if we look at these stories just from the point of view of the child or the man who was banging on the door, then it seems as if the stories are primarily meant to be about a need to be persistent in prayer.
Whereas if we think about the reaction of the parent, or the man who had retired for the night, then each story becomes one about the nature of God.
And that changes the whole picture and means we have to be very careful we understand correctly what we are being taught by Jesus about prayer.
At the start of this gospel passage, He tells His disciples “Say this when you pray” and then gives them the gist of what we have come to call the Lord’s Prayer. And that short form of words is supposed to contain everything Jesus Himself considered necessary in a spoken prayer.
Phone-book length lists of subjects - let’s pray for hospitals, surgeons, oh yes and nurses, and what about doctors’ surgeries and, while we’re at it, chemists and pharmaceutical suppliers - are not what God wants. “Do not pray as the heathens do,” says Jesus in Matthew VI. “They imagine they will be heard because of their many words.”
I’ll never forget one of the more eccentric tutors at my theological college going so far as to interrupt acts of worship led by the students whenever the hapless intercessor, having once said “let us pray for the world” tried to get any further. The tutor was rather heavy-handedly making the point that, once you have prayed for the world, you have by implication prayed for everything and everyone in it.
Well. So. Let’s face the big question: Why do we have intercessions at all? What is the purpose of them?
I think it’s this.
When we pray, as we do, about someone’s eye disease or someone else’s brain tumour, we are not telling God His business or reminding Him in case He has forgotten. We are expressing our love and concern for these people and showing our love and concern to God. That is all we can do and God loves us for doing it.
There’s a film called LOURDES about a paralysed pilgrim in a wheelchair whose faith is shaky. At one point she tells a priest she is angry because God has always refused her request for a normal life.
“What is a ‘normal life’?” the priest challenges her. “Every life is special and unique. Do you think people who have the use of their legs are automatically happier than you? Let us pray together for the healing of your soul that you may know you are loved.”
When we are anxious or scared, we all instinctively pester God with heartfelt demands that someone be cured of some fatal illness. I have heard manic prayer-group leaders exclaim with frustration when such a patient dies: we just didn’t pray hard enough!!
But God doesn’t want special pleading or specific demands. He wants us simply to pray “Thy will be done” out of love for the patient on our hearts.
The key to all this is that God does not intervene like a conjuror with a magic wand. He has created the world as it is and He lets events take their course, including the sometimes physically destructive power of disease and the forces of nature and the evil which men perpetrate against each other. That is the price He paid in giving us freewill.
If He can alter things for the better, it will be usually be through human agency. That is why you see God’s hand at work in the human response to tragedy or disaster.
So here is the real point of intercessions: they focus us, they wake us up, they concentrate our attention on our duty to be the eyes and ears, the hands and the heart of Christ on earth, to be the branches of His vine.
It is a waste of time to pray to God for the relief of poverty or suffering unless our prayer serves as an alarm call to ourselves and others to do something about it in God’s name and spirit.
“In His spirit”. That vital phrase takes us back to where we began.
Back to the story about the parents being wise and loving enough not to give a snake or a scorpion instead of fish or an egg to their hungry child.?
What did Jesus say exactly? If you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give [what exactly?] give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him.
That is what we should ask for. Because if we are armed with the power and joy of the Holy Spirit, we can be the answer to our own prayers and those of millions of others. We can be as Christ to them and see Christ in their faces.
And now we can see the true and amazing good news in these ”How much more” stories of His.
You don’t have to be persistent in prayer, to bang your head against a brick wall.
· God is not like the man in bed who didn’t want to be disturbed and only got up to stop the noise waking his children and the neighbours. God’s door is always open if we do but knock. Ask for the Holy Spirit and you will find.
· God knows our every need so much better than the average human parents with natural protective instincts towards their children. He knows what we need before we even ask.
How much more does God love us than we could ever deserve! How much more does God love us than we could ever love Him!
But, once we learn this lesson, how much more we can do for Him!