Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This spring, we’re looking at the parables of Jesus from the New Testament book of Luke.

This week we are looking at prayer-- a topic that, for many newer Christians, is like flossing or stretching. We all know its important, and yet nobody feels like they do it enough or are doing it well! Why do we struggle to pray? The reason we struggle to pray is that we struggle to trust God! Jesus knows this, and so he gives us these two parables to illustrate the incredible access and security we have when we come to God in prayer. When we really see the trustworthiness of our God, we will trust him with our troubles in prayer.

QUOTES:

“In prayer, we approach a loving, listening Father, and we are helped by the intercession of the Son and the groaning of the Spirit … When the Father promises to hear prayer, it is an assurance of his loving inclination to receive our prayer as acceptable and to answer it in his kindness. The Father’s desire to hear the prayers of his children is so radical that he says, “Before they call I will answer; while they are yet speaking I will hear” (Isa. 65:24). By the time we clear our throats, the Father is already listening.” - Megan Hill

“The human condition teeters on the edge of disaster. Human beings are in trouble most of the time. Those who don’t know they are in trouble are in the worst trouble. Prayer is the language of the people who are in trouble and know it, and who believe or hope that God can get them out. As prayer is practiced, it moves into other levels and develops other forms, but trouble – being in the wrong, being in danger, realizing that the foes are too many for us to handle – is the basic provocation for prayer. Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, “I only pray when I am in trouble. But I am in trouble all the time, and so I pray all the time.”  -Eugene Peterson