Week 2: St Bart’s Values Prayer (Luke 11:1-13) Discussion Questions
1. How important do you see prayer to your life? How about for the life of our church? 2. Why do you think it is hard for what we believe in theory (about the importance of prayer) to transfer into practice? 3. How does prayer help us grow in our relationship with God? Has anyone ever inspired you with their prayerfulness? What can you learn from them? 4. How is prayer both conversation and encounter with God?
Read Luke 11:1-4 1. How has Jesus taught us to pray? Does this reflect your prayer life? 2. What is the significance of the Lord’s Prayer being addressed to God as ‘Father’? What are the implications of our prayer life that we come before God as his children? 3. Why is prayer so integral to our relationship with God? What does it look like to listen to God? 4. How does prayer help us ‘get on board’ with God’s kingdom priorities? Have you ever changed what you were praying for through the process of praying? 5. If we prayed more like Jesus, what would our prayers be full of?
Read Luke 11:5-10 6. Why was the neighbour’s request for bread so outrageous? What is meant by ‘shameless’? How can our prayer life to be shameless in approach? 7. Do you think it is often too easy to give up on praying for something or just ‘go through the motions’? How can we be more passionate in our prayer life? 8. Why is praying for something persistently not the same as demanding something from God?
Read Luke 11:11-13 9. What is the point of Jesus’ comparison with earthly fathers giving good gifts? What then is our basis for trusting God when we pray? 10. Why is it sometimes good for us not to have our prayers answered as we desire? 11. How amazing is it that God does not even withhold his Spirit from those who trust in him? 12. Do you think your prayer life is focused, shameless, and trusting? What steps can you take to make it more so? 13. How should our lives be characterised by prayer? What small steps can you take in the coming week to grow in your prayer life? How can we as a church grow in our prayerfulness?
St Bart’s Anglican Church
Talk 2/5 (“WHAT ST BART’S VALUES”): 10/04/16 “Prayerful” by the Rev’d Adam Lowe
Bible Passages: Luke 11:1-13
INTRODUCTION \\ A HOUSE OF PRAYER?
Last week we began our new series exploring the core values of our church. • We have five of them: Biblical, Prayerful, Proclaiming, Relational, and Mobilising. • These are our DNA. These values are what make St Bart’s, St Bart’s, as we seek to carry out our mission to make and mature disciples of Jesus Christ for God’s glory. • Last week we asked looked at ‘biblical’, this week we look at what does it mean to be a prayerful church? • What does it mean to be a church of passionate followers of Jesus, whose lives, individually and collectively, are characterised, by prayer? • So that when people hear of St Bart’s being a ‘house of prayer’, it’s actually reflected in the quality of our relationship with God. • That prayer is so fundamental to our identity, that it completely underpins everything we do, because we recognise that without prayer, we simply can’t be flourishing in relationship with God.