Writing titles is tough. You want to be witty but clear. You want to be content-specific but universally understood. And above all, alliteration always arrests attention.
I’ll admit that a constant temptation for me when writing a sermon is to start with the title. I don’t consciously think of it that way. I think it’s a result of trying to be thematic - setting the arc for my sermon and making sure it lands where it’s supposed to, i.e. staying “on message.” And sometimes a text will contain a word or phrase that just sounds good. It captures attention without trying too hard. Your eyes linger over the words as if they were written in bold.
That happened to me as I was preparing to preach on Luke 11:1-13. This is the account of Jesus teaching his disciples the Lord’s Prayer. After he speaks the words of the prayer, he explains it with a couple short parables. The first is about a person who bothers his friend in the middle of the night, asking for some bread. The newest (2011) translation of the New International Version of the Bible translates Jesus’ concluding statement this way:
I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.
Shameless audacity. Now that’s title material.
Jesus’ Guide to Shamelessly Audacious Prayer
You Can Pray Shamelessly Too
Be Audacious Disciples
(Maybe my brain is broken, but that last one just looks like the French spelling for Bodacious Disciples.)
Shameless audacity doesn’t just use strong, captivating words; it provides powerful talking points that sometimes even happen to be biblical….
But that’s just the problem. As eager as I was on my first read through the text to rally my Christian family to be shamelessly audacious in their prayers, I wasn’t reading the text to understand; I was reading it to preach and I was missing the point.
When Jesus talks about prayer, and teaches us to pray to our Father in heaven, he is careful to explain that our confidence to be heard does not come from our shameless audacity, but from the willingness of the one who receives our prayer.
The first friend in Jesus’ parable, the one asking for the bread, didn’t bend the sleepy friend to his will with his powers of persuasion. He didn’t cash in a favor or threaten to ring the doorbell all night long. He just asked. He dismissed the fear of rejection - knowing full-well how inconvenient this request was going to be - and counted on the compassion of his friend.
That’s what prayer is. It’s not us storming the gates of heaven and dragging an unwilling God down to earth so that he can see the sorry state of affairs and do something about it. It’s us dismissing our fear of rejection and counting on the compassion of our Father in heaven.
And make no mistake about it - our Father in heaven is far better than any midnight friend. He can’t be inconvenienced. He doesn’t sleep! He knows all our needs before we ask, and he’s eager to give us his good gifts.
The point of prayer is not being shamelessly audacious (although, if you don’t ask how can you expect to receive?); it’s relying on the compassion of our God. The power of prayer does not belong to the pray-er; it belongs to God. We are not the heroes of prayer; as in everything, God is.
So be shamelessly audacious! We don’t have to shy away from that. We can lean into it, not because we believe in the power of the pray-er, but because we know who listens.
God grant you confidence, Christians, to pray, because of his power, but, even more, because of his compassion.