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<P>Sermons for Proper 12: </P>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> Luke 11:1-13 – <STRONG>“You Do Have a
Prayer”</STRONG></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> Luke 11:1-13 –<STRONG> “Our Father”
</STRONG>by Leonard Sweet</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Luke 11 the sermon titled "You Do Have a
Prayer" </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">These illustrations are based on Luke
11:1-13</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Some years ago, when Leonard Griffith was
pastor of the famous City Temple in London, he wrote a fascinating book entitled
Barriers to Christian Belief. In that book he dealt with some problems that have
over the years been real obstacles and stumbling blocks for people in their
faith pilgrimage… specific problems that hinder people, that burden people, that
disturb people… and keep them away from the Christian faith. One of the barriers
he listed was…"unanswered prayer." It does seem to be a fact of our experience
that many people do get discouraged and they do give up and drop out on the
faith because they feel a sense of failure in their prayer life.<BR><BR>This
leads us to ask then… "How do you pray?" "Why pray at all?" "When do you pray?"
"Is there a special formula or a sacred language that should be used?" One thing
is clear. There are many questions and there is much misunderstanding about how
you pray and why. In a Peanuts cartoon Charlie Brown is kneeling beside his bed
for prayer. Suddenly he stops and says to Lucy, "I think I’ve made a new
theological discovery, a real breakthrough. If you hold your hands upside down,
you get the opposite of what you pray for."<BR><BR>Prayer must be more than an
emergency magical lamp rubbed in a crisis. The truth is that many people give up
on prayer because they never understand what prayer is. Much that passes for
prayer is irrational, superstitious, and self-centered, and is therefore
unworthy of the pattern of the prayer that Jesus offered to us his
disciples.<BR><BR>How do you pray and why? We are not the first to ask. The
disciples of Jesus came to Him one day and said, "Lord, teach us. Teach us to
pray!" Notice something here. When did the disciples ask for this? When did they
make this request? Was it after Jesus gave a lecture on prayer? No! Was it after
Jesus led a seminar on prayer? No! Was it after Jesus preached a powerful sermon
on prayer? No! None of these. Remember how it is recorded in Luke 11… "Jesus was
praying in a certain place and when he finished, they said to him, ‘Lord, teach
us to pray.’" They saw the power of prayer in Him. They saw how important prayer
was to Him. See the point. Harry Emerson Fosdick stresses it in his book, The
Secret of Victorious Living. "Note that this awakened interest in prayer came
not at all from new arguments about it, but from a new exhibition of its power.
Here, before their very eyes, they saw a personality in whom prayer was vital
and influen tial! The more they lived with him, the more they saw that they
could never explain him or understand him unless they understood his praying and
so not at all because of new arguments, but because of amazing spiritual power
released in him by prayer. They wanted him to tell them how to pray."<BR><BR>The
disciples sometimes were slow on the uptake, but at this point they were quickly
and precisely on target. They saw in Jesus the answer to this question: how do
we pray and why do we pray? And they learned from Him (as we can) what the
elements are that lead to a meaningful prayer life.</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">1. Jesus Prayed Regularly.</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">2. Jesus Prayed Sensibly.</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">3. Jesus Prayed Confidently.</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">The rest of this sermon following the outline
above can be obtained by joining www.eSermons.com.</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">_______________________</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Luke 11 the sermon titled “Our Father” by
Leonard Sweet </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">If you’ve listened to fairy tales, or if you’ve
watched early classic Disney cartoons, one thing becomes unsettlingly clear: a
lot of “poor little” princes and princesses shared a common family tragedy. In
an overwhelming number of these stories the mothers were gone, dying long before
the child in question could be influenced by them or even remember them. The
single dads in these tales almost always had dreadful taste in women the second
time around — bringing a whole host of evil stepmothers onto the fairy tale
scene.</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Sadly, until later in the twentieth century,
the chances of children losing their mothers and being raised by stepmothers was
common. The overwhelming threat to a woman’s life was childbirth, especially if
any sort of infection set in after delivery. For example, John Milton’s first 2
wives, Mary Powell and Katherine Woodcock, both died in childbirth. Among upper
middle class in 17<SUP>th</SUP> century London, one mother died for every 40
births. By the early decades of the 20<SUP>th</SUP> century, things hadn’t
changed much. In 1929, the wife of the Prime Minister of England, Lucy Baldwin,
pointed out that pregnant women were as likely to die as soldiers had been in
the trenches in the 1914-1918 war. When a woman gave birth, she said, it was
just like “going into battle – she never knows . . . whether she will come out
of it alive or not.” (As quoted in A. Susan Williams, <I>Ladies of Influence:
Women of th e Elite in Interwar Britain</I> [Allen Lane The Penguin Press,
2001]). The single father raising motherless children was an all-to-common
occurrence.</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Single parent households are even more
prevalent today, but for different reasons. Most single parents raising children
on their own today are women. Medical advances have made childbirth safer, and
have raised women’s life expectancy above that of men. But good hygiene and
antibiotics haven’t helped keep families together. In any given American
classroom a conservative estimate finds at least one-third of those kids living
in a home without a father. Whether by death or divorce, choice or chance, more
and more children are growing up in a home that has no consistently present
father figure.</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Along with the abuse of sheer absence, which is
bad enough, there is the worse abuse of presence. Although child abuse is not
confined to one gender, an abusive father figure has a huge affect on children.
And a father who is “occasional” as well as “abusive” magnifies all the
negatives of his influence.</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Why is the lack of positive father figures such
a critical issue for the Church?</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Consider this: the prayer Jesus gave to his
disciples, the prayer we are all taught as children, begins with the audaciously
familiar “Our Father.” What happens to our images of God when our images of “our
fathers” are so tattered and torn?...</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">The rest of Leonard Sweet's sermon can be
obtained by joining www.Sermons.com</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">________________________</DIV>
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