5. Going to a Friend at Midnight
How well do you know God? How do you know? How do you judge how well you know anybody? One way, of course, is by how much information we know about the other person. But I think the truest indication of how well we know somebody is by how well we can predict their behavior. We know what their likes and dislikes are, their values, and consequently how they will act in various situations.
We can finish the sentence our spouse is speaking. We even know what they are going to say before they speak. We can order for them in a restaurant. And if we knew our wives’ sizes, we could pick out the kind of clothes they would wear.
We often hear the phrase: “I don’t even know you.” And usually when we hear it is when a person does something totally different from what someone else expects of them and that person realizes this is a very different person from what they thought they knew.
When people talk about God, two common expressions used are: “coming to know God” and “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Based on how people commonly talk, both of these expressions would suggest that a person getting closer to God or to Jesus should have a better apprehension of what God wants to do in human affairs, what He is willing to do, and under what circumstances He will do it.
I think far too often those of us who talk about knowing God and Jesus find that when we encounter difficult times, we have no clue what we might expect God to do. It may be God’s will to heal one person yet let another person die painfully at a young age and leave a young family. Both of these situations may be spoken of as God’s will. But can that really be true?
There is a passage in the book of Isaiah that is often quoted to show that we can never really know how God thinks. “For my thoughts (or, plans) are not your thoughts, and neither your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as high as the heavens are from the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts from your thoughts.”[1] I think, however, reading the passage in context, the thought is not that God is saying to people that we can never know what He is like, but that His ways of thinking and doing things are very unlike the way humans normally act. So we humans need to start changing our thinking to be more in line with His.
But God has given us the Bible to tell us what He is like. We have mentioned Job before, how that Job went through some difficult times, and God did not tell Job why, and Job had no idea what God was going to do in the end. But WE are told. There was no Bible in the days when Job lived, so Job had to learn a lot of this stuff first hand. But God gave us the Bible to tell us what He is like and what we might expect from Him in our lives.[2]
And to make things even more clear for us, we have Jesus to show us what God is like.[3] When Jesus taught us to pray, He was also telling us what God is like. And when we learn what God is like, He expects us to live in that way.
Right after Jesus teaches his disciples (and us) this prayer, He tells a story to show us what God is like and what prayer is like.[4] Prayer is like going to a friend’s house at midnight . Notice that He is likening God here to a friend of yours. So you go there and ask for what you need, and at first the friend doesn’t want to help because he is tired, the kids are in bed, and he doesn’t want to be bothered. But because of your, the Greek work here is a)nai¿deia (a-nai’-day-ah), which can mean a shameless boldness or insolence, (the nerve of you coming here at midnight !) or just plain insistence and persistence, he will get up and get you what you need.
The point is that the person went to his friend with a specific need and a lot of people wouldn’t even think of doing such a thing because it wouldn’t be polite and proper, but because this person is a friend and you have a need, you do it. And Jesus says that prayer is like that.
This means that you know ahead of time that you can do this, that God is willing, that He is your friend, and sometimes you have to be persistent and bold. Not only is it okay to do this, it seems that Jesus is saying that you can almost count on needing to do this. You can expect that you might have to come boldly and persistently before you get what you need.
Let me say this again. Jesus, the Son of God, is teaching us how to pray. He says that when we pray, when we are talking to God Almighty, we need to be prepared to be bold, persistent, and even shameless in our persistence.
Jesus even goes on to say that we should keep asking, keep seeking, and keep knocking.[5] And we will receive, and find, and have it opened to us.
There are two other stories in the Bible that show that we often may need to know ahead of times just what it is that God wants and then act on it.
The first story is the famous story of David and Goliath.[6] I think sometimes we think a story is so well known and overdone that we dismiss it out of hand and we fail to see all that the story is about.
The nation Israel
This standoff lasted for 40 days. Every day Goliath would come out to the middle and challenge the Israelites. But the Israelites were afraid. Every last one of them was afraid to face him.
Now a question they might have asked their leaders, their pastors, their rabbis, or their priests is this: what is God’s will for us in this situation? Does God want us to serve our enemies, to be defeated by them, harassed by them, or to defeat them? They certainly saw no way to defeat them.
Then David appears. He just came to bring some food to his brothers who were in the army. When he hears the taunts of the Philistine, he is upset. “Who is this Philistine that he should taunt the armies of the living God?”[7] “Let me go, and I will kill him.”
Was this arrogance? Stupidity? Rashness? What made David think that he could do such a thing? Where did he get such confidence?
He was a shepherd; and as such, he would have to defend the flock from bears and lions that came for his sheep. And he has killed both bears and lions. And this Philistine he sees as just another predator attacking where he doesn’t belong. This Goliath was taunting the armies of God. He might as well be taunting God Himself.
David was able to see the circumstances and see clearly what God would want. He then acted on that belief, confident that God would back him up and do what he had believed. David proceeded to kill Goliath. The Philistines did not surrender to the Israelites like promised, but fled with Israel
But back to God’s will. For 40 days the two nations were stalemated. For 40 days nothing happened. Did they pray in that time? Certainly! Did they ask God for help? No doubt! Did they know what God wanted? No, not really! Maybe they thought Goliath might catch pneumonia and die.
But the fact is that nothing happened until someone came along who saw that God’s will was victory over the enemy, not appeasement, not servitude, not harassment, not defeat, but all-out victory.
In a time of trouble, we need to see what God wants for His people, for us, for me. The Lord’s Prayer is one place to start, but certainly not the only place to go. We need to see that God’s will is something that can be known much of the time, and often we will need to take that information and hold on to it and, like the man going to his friend at midnight, keep asking, seeking, knocking until we get what is needed.
If David had not come along, those two nations would still be there.
By the way, after David killed Goliath, it seems that everyone in Israel
There is another story, this time from the Gospels, that shows that we can and need to determine what God wants and then we need to act on it.[9]
This time there was a man who had a son who was demon-possessed. The man knew what the problem was and the boy had had it for a long time. The man first brought the boy to Jesus’ disciples hoping they could help, but they could not. When Jesus comes to them, he asks Jesus to help.
Jesus’ response is interesting. He gets upset and cries out: “O unbelieving and perverted generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you?”[10] Hey, sorry, Jesus. I just asked to see if you could help me.
This too upsets Jesus. “If you can????” Jesus then says something that must have really shaken this father up. He said, “All things are possible to the one who believes.”[11] Now who is Jesus talking about? This man has a son who for years is possessed by a demon. Jesus proceeded to cast it out, but the questions remain: Did this man pray for his son? I am sure he did. Did this man pray often for his son? I am sure he did that too.
We may say that God finally answered his prayer by having Jesus deliver him, but Jesus’ response surely suggests that Jesus is telling the man that he could have delivered his own son years ago, if he could have believed.
Two thoughts: would that have been presumptuous on the man’s part to think that God wanted to deliver the boy? And isn’t Jesus’ response a bit harsh on the man? The man could come down with guilt feelings and a sense of failure. Like it was his fault that the boy suffered so long.
But how could the man have had faith, unless he knew that God wanted his son well? And how was he expected to know that, unless he were expected to know God’s will from the Scriptures, unless he were able either to see something that was promised in the Bible or he was able to deduce about God’s unchanging character from reading about how God acted throughout history.
What is the will of God is probably the single most often question that Christians ask about God. Too often we act as if it could change from day to day, from one extreme to the other. When things get tough in our lives, and they will, we will find our strength and our hope when we determine what is the will of God for us. Since our prayers need to be patterned after the Lord’s Prayer, this can be a good starting point to learn what God’s will is and to seek after it in our lives.
But back to our story. Jesus is teaching His disciples about prayer. He tells them the Lord’s Prayer as an example. But that isn’t all. We don’t just say these few words and go on our way. In the Lord’s Prayer, we are to pray for our daily bread (a)/rtoj) ar´-tos). Then in this story right after, Jesus tells of a man who goes to his friend at midnight asking for three loaves (a)/r-toi ar´- toi, plural of a)r/toj). This man is doing the same thing we are to be doing when we pray for our daily bread.
Now what exactly is happening here? When Jesus tells us to pray for our daily bread, He is indicating first of all that this is God’s will for us to have our daily bread. So we can go to God, fully expecting that we will receive what we ask for.
Now apparently, the answer to our prayers is not always immediate and forthcoming. In fact, it may look like it is not going to be coming at all. And what is our response to be? Keep at it, keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking.
At soon as I wrote this, I thought of that passage in Mark where Jesus tells us that “whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it shall be unto you.”[12]
At first glance, this seems to be a contradiction. On the one hand, we are to be insistent, keeping after God to answer our prayer. In the other case, it is like we don’t have to say another word, because the prayer is answered already. Is there some common thread here? I believe there is. That common thread is the full assurance that God will answer according to our need.
Having said this, I know some people reading this will miss this point entirely. In my book on The Importance of Healing, I distinguish between what I call several scenarios of prayer. Much of the time when we pray, we don’t know what is best for us or the people involved. We just don’t have enough information, about the future and about all the circumstances that will come together to have an influence on the situation.
But there are also many times when we are expected to know what God’s will is; and in these cases, we are expected to ask in faith that our prayer will be answered according to what we are asking. Our daily bread is one instance; protection from evil is another; and in my book on healing, I make the case that healing is another.
The whole point is that prayer is not just asking God for something and waiting to see if the answer is yes, no, or later. Some of it, much of it, is like going to someone who you feel close enough to that you can go to him in the middle of the night and get the help that you want. God is like that. We will look at that more in the next chapter, but our emphasis here is on our prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer is not just some short little thing that we recite. Our lives are fragile, entirely dependent on God; and we are looking to Him for everything that we need to live our lives. We need Him, completely, more than the air we breathe. Our lives depend on Him, His help and His protection.
So pray it like your life depends on it. Because it does.
[1] Isaiah 55:8,9
[2] Romans 15:4, I Corinthians 10:1-11, II Timothy 3:16,17
[3] John 14:8-10
[4] Luke 11:5-8
[5] Luke 11:9,10
[6] I Samuel 17
[7] I Samuel 17:26
[8] II Samuel 21:15-22
[9] Matthew 17:14-20, Mark 9:14 -27, Luke 9:37-43
[10] Mark 9:19
[12] Mark 11:24 dia\ tou=to le/gw u(miÍn, pa/nta oÀsa proseu/xesqe kaiì ai¹teiÍsqe, pisteu/ete oÀti e)la/bete, kaiì eÃstai u(miÍn.
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