We Are To Shamelessly Bug Our Father

And He said to them, Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and will say to him, Friend, lend me three loaves [of bread], For a friend of mine who is on a journey has just come, and I have nothing to put before him; And he from within will answer, Do not disturb me; the door is now closed, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and supply you [with anything]? I tell you, although he will not get up and supply him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his shameless persistence and insistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs. Luke 11:5-8

Jesus tells us in this parable to be shameless in our pursuit of asking our Father for what we need to serve the Kingdom. So basically Jesus is telling us to bug the daylights out of our Father until we receive what we need to help others. Notice that the man in this illustration did not just have a need for himself, but for those who came to him.

Jesus told this parable right after He taught the Disciples how to pray. In the Lord’s Prayer we are told to pray for things like: give us this day our daily bread and lead us not into temptation. We were not shown to pray for our own needs, but to pray for the needs of the body as a whole. Then after Jesus teaches us to pray for everyone, He tells us to shamelessly ask our Father to give us the things that we do not have to help others.

The Truth is that we are to continuously bug our Father to empower us to serve others. We should shamelessly ask our Father to use us to prophesy, 1 Corinthians 14:5. We should ask repeatedly and vigorously to be used to do the works that Jesus did and even greater ones, John 14:12. We should hound our Father repeatedly to send us into all of the world to preach the Truth that will set the captives free. We should bug Him to empower us to lay hands on the sick and they recover. We should repeatedly ask to be empowered to cast out demons, to freely receive and freely give. 1 John 4:17 tells us that as Jesus is, so are we in this world. We should seek, knock, and repeatedly ask our Father to make it so. The laborers are few and the need is great. It is time that we as a body expect and demand that our Father begin to work through us, as He works through Jesus. Even if it looks like our Father first says no, as the man in the parable first said no, keep on shamelessly demanding of our Father that He do it!