Today’s sermon focuses in on Jesus’ words “Ask and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” Because it’s better to actually do prayer rather than talk about it, some might consider instruction on prayer to be a waste of time. But because we don’t know how to pray as we should, and instead end up blabbering aimlessly, maintaining all the while that we are praying from the heart, praying as the Holy Spirit moves us, we need to be taught how to pray. God is not a God of chaos but order, nor does He want prayer to flow from our hearts but from His Word as it is poured into our hearts. Our hearts are full of sinful desires. Without being informed by God’s Word, we would not know whom to pray to, how to pray to Him, what to ask of Him, or even whether He were listening and promised to hear and answer us. With the Word of God, however, we know all of these things. From Christ’s words today we are told that we may bring our requests to our heavenly Father in Jesus’ Name, that we have the promise that He will hear us and grant us our requests, and that as a result we will be filled with joy.
Luther in the Large Catechism when giving the reasons why we should pray concludes from the Word of God that we are to do so because God commands it, because He promises to hear us, because He teaches us how to pray, and because we need it. Later on, Luther wrote a small tract entitled “A Simple Way to Pray.” He wrote it for the sake of his barber friend, Peter, who one day asked Luther for suggestions about how to pray. In this tract Luther lays out what he calls a “garland of four strands” or four steps for constructing a prayer based on either the Catechism or the Word of God. The four strands are Teaching, Thanksgiving, Confession, and Prayer. Taking for example the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods,” under Luther’s first strand - teaching - we ask ourselves, “What is God teaching us here?” Another way of asking this question is, “What are the gifts that God is giving us here?” We may answer that He is teaching us that He is our God and that we are His people, that He has gifted us with Himself and the salvation that He has worked for us through His Son, Jesus Christ, on the cross, and that He will not share His glory with any other gods. He alone is God and is to be feared, loved, and trusted above all things. With Luther’s second strand - thanksgiving - we now ask, “What may I give God thanks for?” Based on this commandment and the gifts that God is giving me here, I may thank God that He has made me His dear child, that He has given me the privilege of calling Him my heavenly Father, and that through Jesus Christ He has given Himself so completely to me and has granted that I might spend eternity with Him in His heavenly kingdom. Using Luther’s third strand - confession - we must now consider how we have sinned against this Word of God, how we have neglected or misused His gifts, and how we have failed to give Him thanks for those gifts. Based on this commandment, I must say that I have not feared, loved, or trusted in God above all things, that I have forgotten that He redeemed me with the holy precious blood and innocent suffering and death of His Son, and that I have placed many other gods before Him. For this I deserve His temporal and eternal punishment. But then we turn to the fourth strand - prayer, where we now have something specific to ask God for. Based on what God is teaching me in this commandment, what He is giving me in these words, and how I’ve sinned against them, I can now thank God for His gifts, confess to Him how I have broken His commandment, and also ask that He would forgive me such sin for Christ’s sake and then help me by the power of His Holy Spirit to fear, love, and trust in Him above all things. We then end our prayer with the word “Amen,” which means “Yes! Yes! So shall it be.” By placing “Amen” at the end of our prayers we are saying that God has heard us for Christ’s sake, that He will grant what we request, since we have asked according to His Word, and that as a result He will fill us with joy.
And now you see how we have just constructed a prayer based on the first commandment. Luther’s tract shows how you can apply his four strands of prayer - Teaching, Thanksgiving, Confession, and Prayer - to any of the parts of the Catechism - from the 10 commandments, to the Apostles’ Creed, to the Lord’s Prayer and the Sacraments. Not only that, but you can practice constructing prayers by applying these four strands to the Scriptures as well. And that’s what I’d like to do today with the Lord’s words about prayer from the Gospel lesson before us. Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my Name, He will give it to you. Until now you have asked nothing in my Name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” Using Luther’s first strand - teaching, we ask, “What is the Lord teaching us here? What gifts is He giving us?” The main gift is the great privilege of being able to come to God with our prayers and petitions with the promise that He will hear and answer us for Christ’s sake. As a child of God, you have God’s ear 24/7. Not everyone can say that - only those who are in Christ. To be sure that the Father hears you you must come to Him in Jesus’ Name. To come to the Father in Jesus’ Name means that you believe in Jesus as your crucified and risen Savior, and that you come clothed in Him and cleansed of your sins by way of your Baptism. Because you are in Jesus Christ by way of your Baptism and through faith in Him, you can confidently and boldly come to God the Father in prayer and lay your requests before Him. Because you’re in Christ, however, you will not be asking that your will be done, but that His will be done. The Apostle John writes elsewhere, “This is the confidence that we have towards Hm, that if we ask anything according to His will He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of Him.”
And so, there are many gifts now that we may thank God for from this text. Using Luther’s second strand of thanksgiving, we may thank God for the privilege of prayer given us in Christ, for His promise to grant us whatever we ask for in Jesus’ Name, and for the joy with which He fills us when He answers our prayers. We may even thank Him that He doesn’t give us everything we want, but that He does grant us everything that He knows we need. From these words we also know that even if God does not grant us our requests right away, He will eventually give us what we ask for, provided again that we’ve asked according to His will.
Using Luther’s third strand of confession, we must now confess to our heavenly Father how we have sinned against these words of our Lord, either by misusing them, neglecting them, or disbelieving them. Sometimes, whether it’s because He delays His answer or because He doesn’t give us what we want, we doubt that God truly hears our prayers. Such doubt calls into question Christ’s promise here. In effect, it says that He’s lying to us. This doubt and disbelief is sin and must be confessed and repented of. We might also have to confess that just like the Lord’s eleven disciples we don’t pray as often as we should, sometimes not at all. Those Christians who think that prayer is optional must be reminded that our Lord commands us to pray. If His promises and our own need don’t motivate us to pray, then at least His command should. Then we must confess that we’ve also misused this command by treating God like some kind of a genie, who’s supposed to grant our every wish. We must confess that sometimes we use Jesus’ Name as if it were some kind of magic wand that we can invoke over anything we desire and have it granted to us, just because we’ve used the right incantation.
For these sins and more we must confess that we deserve God’s temporal and eternal punishment. But for the sake of Christ, we may also confess that we have a Savior, who has borne that punishment for us on the cross. For His sake God forgives you your sins, even your failure to pray as you ought to, and grants you life and salvation. In our baptismal waters He adopted us as His sons and gave Himself to us as our God, whom we also have been given the privilege of calling our Father. Cleansed of our sins with the blood of Christ, we may now boldly and confidently approach His throne of grace and bring our petitions before Him, asking Him as dear children ask their dear Father. And so, using Luther’s forth strand of prayer, we pray that our heavenly Father would forgive us our sins of abusing prayer, of neglecting it, and of disbelieving the promises connected to it, and ask instead that the Holy Spirit might work in us through His Word that kind of prayer that is pleasing to Him, with the result that we might not only bring glory to God, but that we might also receive from Him what we need and be filled with the joy that He wants to give us.
The Lord gives you the privilege of prayer, that your joy might be full. He gives you that joy in answering your prayers, giving you the things for which you ask, when they are asked according to His will. Non-Christians do not have this gift. They have no promise that God hears them or that He will answer them. At one time we were all in this condition, in which on account of our sins we could not approach God as our heavenly Father and call upon Him for His help. But our Savior Jesus Christ is the Way to the Father. By His blood shed at Calvary we have been reconciled to the Father, and with that blood our sins have been washed away, so that now as we stand in Christ, clothed with Him and His righteousness, we may come before God’s throne of grace and receive the mercy and grace to help us in our times of need.
Have joy of the gift of prayer again today, throughout the week, and for the rest of your life. Treasure it and practice it. Use Luther’s four strands to help you learn how to pray both the Catechism and God’s Word, asking yourself, “What is God teaching me here, for what may I thank Him, what must I confess to Him, and for what may I ask Him?” Then, whether you’re Peter the Barber, Joe the trash collector, or Mary the housewife, “Ask and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” You have God’s ear in Jesus’ Name. Amen.