Biblion Bible Commentary
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Teach Us to Pray
Luke 11:1-13
1 When he finished praying in a certain place, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples.” · WEB
They ask for a prayer and get one — followed by a friend banging on a door at midnight and a father who is not a monster.
When he finished praying in a certain place, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples" Luke 11:1.
The request arises from watching him. They have seen him pray all night before choosing them, alone before Peter's confession, on the mountain — and what they ask for is not an explanation but a form, the way a rabbi gave his followers one.
The prayer itself is treated in Matthew's account Matthew 6:9–13, where it stands in the sermon and is given in its fuller form. This version is shorter and its shortness is instructive: the same requests, stripped further.
Two of its phrasings are worth marking. "Give us day by day our daily bread" Luke 11:3 — the asking is repeated as the supply is, and nobody is taught to request a year's provision. And "forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us" Luke 11:4: sins upward, debts across, which is how the two are related throughout this Gospel Luke 7:41–42.
Then the parable this account alone carries, and it is not what a reader expects to follow the Lord's Prayer.
"Which of you, if you go to a friend at midnight and tell him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread'?" Luke 11:5.
The situation is a hospitality emergency, which in that culture was serious. A traveler has arrived unannounced at a house with an empty cupboard, and failing to feed him would shame the whole village. So the man goes to a neighbor in the middle of the night.
"Don't bother me. The door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I can't get up" Luke 11:7. The refusal is realistic. A one-room house with a barred door and the family asleep on a single raised platform — getting up means waking everyone.
"Although he will not rise and give it to him because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence, he will get up and give him as many as he needs" Luke 11:8.
The parable works by contrast rather than comparison. God is not a reluctant neighbor who has gone to bed; the argument runs from the lesser case to the greater. If shameless persistence gets results even from a man who does not want to help, then asking is not futile — and the point is not that God must be worn down but that the asker should not stop.
"Keep asking, and it will be given you. Keep seeking, and you will find. Keep knocking" Luke 11:9. The verbs are continuous. Not one request, but a practice.
"Which of you fathers, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?" Luke 11:11. The second illustration corrects any impression the first might leave. Now the picture is a father, and the question is whether he would answer a hungry child with something inedible or dangerous. Nobody would.
"If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?" Luke 11:13.
The concession in the middle — being evil — is dropped in without argument, and the argument runs straight through it. Even flawed parents do not hand their children scorpions.
And the gift named at the end is this account's own. The other telling says good things; here the good thing is specified, and it is the Spirit. The whole passage on prayer ends by naming what the Father is most willing to give, and it is himself.
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