Pray Constantly
How We Continue in New Life (1 of 4) · Luke 11:1–13
By Michael A. Graham
Introduction
God is three Persons — Father, Son, and Spirit — who know and love and speak to one another, and always have. When he made the world, he said, “Let us make man in our own image” (Genesis 1:26). That “us” is God in conversation with God. Before anyone was here to pray, there was already this: God speaking within himself, in love. A child can hold that — God is a family of three who have always talked and loved together. So prayer did not begin with us. It reaches back into the life of God.
We have been walking through A New Life, learning the gospel one fact at a time. The last fact is that we receive this new life by repentance and faith, and then keep it the way we received it — by repentance and faith, day after day. That keeping has its ways, and this week we start with the first of them: prayer. For prayer is where repenting and believing go on — turning from ourselves back to the Father, and trusting him, again and again. We are learning to pray.
And we learn it from the Son. When the Son of God came into our world, he kept up that conversation with his Father. Luke shows him at prayer everywhere he goes. The disciples watched the Son of God pray, day after day, and it made them want it: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). Sit with the weight of that. If the Son of God, who lacked nothing, lived in constant prayer to his Father, how much more do we need to pray? We treat prayer as a crutch for weak moments. But the Son himself prayed without stopping. Prayer is the life of the Son, and here he begins to bring us into it.
He teaches them a short prayer, and the lesson ends with a gift that takes them by surprise. We will let that gift land when we reach it. For now, watch the Son teach us to ask — and to keep asking.
Luke 11:1–13 (NIV 1984)
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say: “‘Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.'” Then he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.’ Then the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs. “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Movement 1 — The Principle: Keep asking your Father for daily bread (Luke 11:9)
Keep asking your Father for daily bread (Luke 11:9).
When the disciples ask, teach us to pray (Luke 11:1), the first word the Son puts in their mouths is Father (Luke 11:2) — his own word for God. That one word shapes the rest. He does not hand us a spell or a set of magic words to work on God; he gives us a person to speak to, a good Father, already ours. And it was a bold thing to hand people. In Jesus’ day the Jews held God’s name too holy to say out loud. Now the Son puts on ordinary lips the very word he uses with God — Father — a word of real nearness and real honor at once. Who is this, to teach us to speak to God that way? Hold the question; it grows as we go.
And look at whose lips he puts it on. He says teach us, and the prayer keeps saying us and our — our Father, our bread, our sins. This is a family prayer, given to a people, and one we also pray alone — the same our Father on our lips whether we are by ourselves or gathered. The men learning it here are all Jews, gathered around their Lord. But the our is a seed. As the gospel goes out, it grows into one family at one table — from every nation, and every kind of person the world keeps apart, Jew and Greek, slave and free (Galatians 3:28) — praying the same prayer to the same Father. It breaks open at Pentecost, when his Spirit falls on people from every nation. For now, hear the plain thing: this prayer is ours together as much as it is mine alone. Come to your Father — you, and you with his people — and keep asking him.
The prayer turns to God before it turns to our needs. Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come (Luke 11:2). We ask first that God be treated as God, and that his good rule come — over the world, and over our own lives. To ask for God’s kingdom to come is to ask him to be King here, in the real world and in me, and to set right what is wrong. We ask for God, and then for bread.
Then the prayer turns to us, and each request tells the truth about us. We ask for bread because our life is a gift we receive each day. We ask for forgiveness because he clears our record. We ask for help in testing because he holds us up. And Jesus frames it day by day — give us each day our daily bread (Luke 11:3). That is the pattern of the manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16), where God gave his people enough for the day and had them gather again each morning, so they would keep coming back to him. God still feeds his children like that. He gives us today’s bread, so tomorrow we come again.
And the last request opens onto the whole of life: lead us not into temptation (Luke 11:4). It is one word with two faces. When God brings the trial, it is a test — he proves faith and makes it strong, as he did in the wilderness, humbling his people to teach them they live by his word and not by bread alone (Deuteronomy 8:2–3). When the enemy brings it, it is a temptation — meant to make faith fall. So we pray: Father, in the trial, keep me; do not let the testing become my undoing. And Jesus ties this petition to a garden. On his last night he tells his friends the very thing he taught them to pray — pray that you will not fall into temptation (Luke 22:40, 46), the same word he used here. They sleep instead; Peter walks into the test and denies him. The one thing that would have held them was the one thing they would not do — pray.
Then Jesus tells a small story to show the kind of asking he means. A man’s guest arrives at midnight and he has an empty cupboard — and in that time and place, an empty table for a guest was a real shame. So he goes and knocks on a neighbor’s door in the middle of the night and keeps knocking until his friend gets up and gives him what he needs. That is the picture: keep coming, keep asking, stay at the door. Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you (Luke 11:9). It is about us, of course — he is teaching us to pray, and the asking is real: keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. But it is about him before it is about us. Luke never leaves the asking hanging in the air; every verb has its gift, and every gift its Giver: ask, and it will be given; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened. The weight rests first on the One who answers. We come as children to a Father’s door, and the Father opens.
He is the God who has turned dirt and rain into bread since the world began, and ripened water into wine in the vine every summer. And he has always done it through his Son — through him all things were made (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16). So when Jesus turns water into wine at Cana (John 2:1–11), the eternal Son is doing openly, and at a word, what he has always been doing in the slow ripening of the vine — the same Lord giving the same gift, whether by ordinary means or by miracle, across a season or in a moment. That is the Father we ask for daily bread.
This is what faith looks like on its knees: a child coming to a good Father, empty-handed, trusting, again and again. Children, this part is simple enough for you: your Father is good, so keep coming to him and keep asking.
Keep asking your Father for daily bread (Luke 11:9). The Son prayed to this Father without stopping. Why do the rest of us find it so hard?
Movement 2 — The Problem: I ask for his bread, but not for him (Luke 11:11)
I ask for his bread, but not for him (Luke 11:11).
Start where the honesty is easiest. Most of us pray, or try to. When trouble comes fast, almost anyone will cry out to God. So the problem is not that we never pray. The problem shows up when we set our praying next to the Son’s.
He prayed like breathing. His closest friends, who walked with him for three years, could not manage it. In the garden, on his hardest night, he asked three of them to watch and pray, and the three strongest fell asleep. “Could you not watch one hour?” (Mark 14:37). The one thing they could not do together was pray together. What they could do was argue over which of them was the greatest (Luke 22:24). Jack Miller puts his finger on it: “they’re competitive and they’re prayerless. And isn’t that often a mark of my own poor proud heart — prayerless and competitive?”
That is the mirror, and it needs no one pointing a finger. Our prayerlessness is not a small gap in the schedule. It quietly shows us how full of ourselves we are. Miller again: “The disclosure to yourself of how self-centered you are is your unwillingness or inability to surrender yourself and your agenda to God in prayer.” No one has to accuse us. We watch our own trouble handing ourselves and our plans over to God, and there it is. The Son surrendered everything to his Father in prayer; we, at our best, hold an hour back.
And when we do pray, watch what we tend to do with it. We use prayer to get what we want, while we keep control for ourselves. This is the old difference between faith and magic. Magic tries to use God — a word, a ritual, even prayer itself — to make life go my way. Faith does the opposite: it trusts God, and lets him be Lord. So we come to prayer for the bread, which we can spend however we like, and would rather not deal with the Giver — because the Giver is the Lord, and to have him is to let him run the house. We reach for the gift and try to hold the Giver at arm’s length. But no one can put God outside. Where can I flee from your presence? the psalm asks, and the answer is nowhere (Psalm 139:7). He does not wait on the porch for us to fetch him; he is already here, already calling us to turn and trust him.
And a word to anyone listening in who has always taken prayer for superstition — wishful words aimed at the ceiling, a way to nudge life your way. If that is all prayer is, you are right to leave it. Jesus is after something else. Magic wants a technique that works; faith wants a Father to trust. He is not handing you a trick to run, but a person to know.
The sharpest picture of this is the Son himself in the temple. That building was his Father’s house, meant to be a house of prayer for all nations (Isaiah 56:7). By Jesus’ day it had become a marketplace. He called it a den of robbers (Luke 19:46, quoting Jeremiah 7:11) — a den of thieves, in the older words many of us know by heart: a place to buy and sell and take, instead of a place to pray. That is the one scene where he takes up a whip and drives people out (John 2:15). His Father’s house of prayer, turned into a place of grabbing, moved him to open anger. Prayer matters that much to the Son. And the same trade creeps into us — prayer made for trusting God, bent into a way of getting and keeping. The house of prayer becomes a den of thieves, in the temple and in the heart.
Under it is a pride that hides from us. We hate to stay empty. We would rather be filled once and set for life, off God’s hands, done with the asking. Coming back each morning with open, empty hands feels beneath us. And pride tells us we need less help than we do. A few years ago researchers in England asked prisoners to rate themselves against the average person — for kindness, honesty, generosity, self-control, and more. The prisoners scored themselves higher on almost every count. The one place they came out only average was keeping the law. Men behind bars judged themselves better than the people walking free. That is what pride does to us; we are all fuller and finer in our own eyes than we are.
And yet the heart cannot stay empty. It keeps reaching to be full, and it fills with something — control, achievement, a habit, our own plans — anything that lets us feel full without coming to God for it. So it comes down to who fills us.
There is one more reason we hold back, and it is tender. For some, “father” is a hard word. Some buried a father. Some had one who was there in body and absent in the ways that matter. Some were hurt by the man meant to protect them. “Come to your Father” can land like an old wound. That is real, and the gospel meets it head on.
So set beside the praying Son, our prayerlessness — and the way we bend prayer to our own use — shows us, gently and from the inside, how much we love ourselves, and how much we need to be taught to pray.
I ask for his bread, but not for him (Luke 11:11). Left there, prayer stays a closed door. But the Father comes out to us. He answers the prayer we should have prayed, with a gift we never thought to ask for.
Movement 3 — The Gospel: In Christ my Father gives more than bread — his own Spirit (Luke 11:13)
In Christ my Father gives more than bread — his own Spirit (Luke 11:13).
Here is the gift we were told to wait for. Through the passage Jesus has filled our mouths with bread — daily bread, three loaves at midnight, a fish, an egg — until we are sure we know what the Father gives: things, help, our needs met. Then he names it, and it lands bigger than bread. If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him (Luke 11:13). The gift the Father gives is himself. He gives his own Spirit.
The people listening would have caught their breath, because they carried a promise. The prophets had spoken of a day when God would pour out his Spirit on all people — Joel said it (Joel 2:28–29), and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 36:26–27), and Isaiah (Isaiah 44:3) — a day when God would put his own Spirit inside his people and come to live with them. That day was the great hope of Israel. And here Jesus takes that hope and puts it in the hands of anyone who will ask. So the question from the first movement comes due: who is this, to promise the Spirit that God promised? He is either saying far too much, or he is the Son with the right to give his Father’s Spirit. Luke’s second book answers it. The risen Jesus goes up, and at Pentecost he pours out the Spirit the prophets foretold (Acts 2:33). He had the right all along.
Now sit with the word evil. Jesus is talking about us at our best — a parent who would do a great deal for a child — and he calls even that love evil. He means the good in us runs bent, that something is off deep down, even in the love we are proud of. So a hard question stands under the gift: if we are like that, how can a holy God give his own Spirit — give himself — to people like us? Can he simply wave it through?
To wave it through, he would have to stop being good. A judge who lets real wrong slide is corrupt. A God who handed his Spirit to guilty people as though the guilt were nothing would stop being the God worth trusting. So the gift comes at a price, and the price was paid. At the cross the Son took our evil onto himself — our guilt became his (2 Corinthians 5:21) — so that the holy God could give himself to guilty people and still call evil evil. People sometimes ask whether God could have found an easier way. This is the way that keeps him holy and near at once: the King himself pays what it costs to bring us home.
So the Spirit is a gift you receive, rather than buy or earn or work up. Try to force God’s hand with the right words, and you are back to magic — and God will not be used that way. You come with open hands, and he fills them. This is where using God turns into trusting him.
And here is the turn that undoes our self-reliance, and Jack Miller loved to press it. We read ask, seek, knock and everyone who asks receives, and quietly make ourselves the heroes — as if prayer were the strength of our asking, the reach of our seeking, the force of our knocking. Miller took us to another door. In Revelation the risen Jesus says, Here I am! I stand at the door and knock (Revelation 3:20). We love to quote it as proof of our free will — Jesus is knocking, and all we have to do is open. Look again, Miller said. Most of us have piled the furniture against that door. We have bolted it and added deadlocks and barricaded ourselves in behind our achievements, our ministries, our own goodness, because we do not want him coming in to run the house. And Jesus does not give up. He sends his Holy Spirit down into the basement of our lives and turns up the heat — through our struggles, our failures, our dead ends — until the air runs out and we cannot stand it, and at last we throw the furniture aside, unbolt the locks, and open the door. Then we turn around and grin: Look what I did — I used my free will to let Jesus in. Miller would laugh at the sheer nerve of it. We did not open because we were good, or wise, or finally spiritual enough. We opened because he would not stop knocking, and the Spirit would not stop working. So even the asking is his gift before it is our act. The One we picture ourselves seeking has been seeking us the whole time; the door we thought we opened, he pried open from the inside.
And if you are outside all of this — you have never prayed a word you meant, and you are not sure anyone is there to hear — the offer still has your name on it. Everyone who asks receives (Luke 11:10). You come as you are, with empty hands, and ask. That is where it begins for every one of us.
And the same Jesus who teaches us to say Father is, right now, saying it for us. He gives us the word, wins us the Spirit, and prays for us besides. On the night he was betrayed he told a man about to fail him, I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail (Luke 22:32) — the prayer went up before the fall came. And he lives to pray for those who come to God through him (Hebrews 7:25). So our prayers ride up caught inside his. When your faith runs thin, his holds, and his prayer for you holds you.
And here is a word for those who flinched at “Father.” The Son himself, on the cross, cried out to his Father — My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34) — and met silence, cut off, in the dark, and he went there on purpose, so that the fatherless could be carried home to a Father who stays. This Father is more than your earthly father with his rough edges smoothed. He is a different Father — the good one we were made for.
The Spirit he gives is the Spirit of his own Son (Galatians 4:6) — the one who makes us God’s children, so we can say Father and mean it. He cries that Abba, Father in people of every nation, each in his own tongue; that is why he came on the frightened followers of Jesus at Pentecost in the languages of the world (Acts 2:4–11). One Father, one Spirit, one cry, in a thousand voices — and he made them bold. He is comfort, and he is power, and he is God himself, come to live in us.
In Christ my Father gives more than bread — his own Spirit (Luke 11:13). What is left is to keep coming, every day, for the Giver himself.
Movement 4 — Our Response: So each day I keep asking — for him, not just his bread (Luke 11:3)
So each day I keep asking — for him, not just his bread (Luke 11:3).
The answer is not “try harder at prayer.” Trying harder to force the result is only magic again — straining to make life come out my way. The answer runs the other direction: to come with open hands and give myself over to the Father — myself and my plans — and to keep coming, asking him first for himself, and then for his gifts.
If that sounds beyond us, it is. Watch what Luke does across his two books. In the first, Jesus is forever slipping away to pray — at his baptism (Luke 3:21), alone on a mountain through the night (Luke 6:12), in the garden (Luke 22:41) — while the men closest to him cannot keep watch for an hour. In the second, the book of Acts, those same men will not stop praying. It opens with them “joined together constantly in prayer” (Acts 1:14); they devote themselves to it (Acts 2:42); when Peter is thrown in prison, the church prays through the night (Acts 12:5, 12). The sleepers of the garden became the ones who prayed without ceasing. What changed was not their willpower. The risen Son poured out his Spirit — the Spirit of the praying Son — and the prayer they could not manage beside him now rose up from within them. And that same Spirit your Father gives to everyone who asks. Their story is our hope.
But if we have already received the Spirit, why keep asking for him? The Spirit is a Person, and you receive him whole; a Christian already has all of him. The asking, then, is not for a bigger dose of God. It is that more of us would be given over to the God we already have — and that giving-over is repentance.
Repentance is not earning; it is how room is made. Looking back over his life, Miller saw that for years his heart lacked room — space — for the love of God to enter, because what filled the center was the wish to be a winner. So the Spirit does not simply move into our fear and our plans and our loves and leave them as he finds them. Perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18) — he does not fill our fear, he drives it out. He does not prosper our plans, he overturns them. He does not leave our loves in their old order, he reorders them around himself. This is what we are really praying in your kingdom come: not that God would bless the little kingdoms we are building, but that he would overturn every kingdom on earth, our own among them. Repentance and prayer are one motion — each day a little of our own kingdom comes down so that his may come, and the fullness already ours fills the room it clears. He is all ours; we are learning to be all his.
And the fullness is already ours. Last week we heard that all the fullness of God lives in Christ, and that in him we have been given that fullness (Colossians 2:9–10). The psalm even has a word for it — portion: God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever (Psalm 73:26). He himself is our share and our inheritance, the whole of God made ours to enjoy. Prayer is how that fullness, already ours, becomes ours in practice, one day at a time. We pray to live in what we already have.
That fullness is a Person — Christ himself, a fountain — and a fountain is for drinking. So we come empty each morning, not because we are running low on God, but because the life he gives is a life of daily drinking. We stay people who need him, and he keeps filling us.
This is why the old teachers called prayer the eye of faith. Faith sees what the body’s eyes miss — God himself, his promises, Christ over all of it. Prayer is that seeing put to work: faith lifting its eyes off ourselves and our troubles, up to the Father, to receive from him. And even the lifting is his doing. Miller said prayer is how God lifts our hearts to heaven and hooks us into his promises. By his Spirit he raises our hearts to where Christ is — “lift up your hearts,” the old call in worship, means exactly this — and there he fastens us to promises that are all Yes in Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:20). We do not pull God down to us; he lifts us up to him.
When we do not know how to pray, that too is covered. Paul says the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express (Romans 8:26). When a groan is all you have, that groan is the Spirit praying in you, and it reaches the Father. So even our praying is a gift we come and ask for. The first prayer in the passage is the disciples’ own — Lord, teach us to pray (Luke 11:1) — asking for help with the very thing they were doing. And since the Spirit is the one who helps us pray, to ask your Father for the Holy Spirit is to pray for your praying.
Miller lived this way. He prayed for the prayer meeting before the prayer meeting. Late in his life, after a stroke, he was still asking a friend to “pray for my praying as I pray for yours,” longing to pray “with more faith and bolder claiming of the promises.” A man who had prayed for decades still asked for help to pray. So, two questions. When did you last pray for your praying? When did you last ask your Father for the Holy Spirit?
This asking is meant to be daily, like the manna — fresh each morning, gathered again rather than hoarded. Today’s bread, asked for today, and asked as a child at home with his father, not as a hired hand working for pay (Luke 15:19). A child talks with his father through the day and comes back again and again, because the house is home.
This daily habit is quietly training us for the last day. In the prayer, give us each day our daily bread and lead us not into temptation stand side by side — because the daily asking is where God gives us the faith and repentance we will need when the testing comes. Jesus made it a daily thing: take up your cross daily and follow me (Luke 9:23). So each morning is a small rehearsal — dying a little to ourselves, receiving his life in its place.
One of those mornings will be our last, and God has already marked it; he wrote all our days before one of them began (Psalm 139:16). When it comes, we will meet it the only way we have ever met a day — with open, empty hands. Our faith will hold at the end, not because our grip is strong, but because God is faithful, and he will not let us be tested beyond what we can bear (1 Corinthians 10:13), and because the Son who taught this prayer is praying it still: I have prayed for you… that your faith may not fail (Luke 22:32). His prayer holds us; his Spirit keeps us.
This prayer was never a solo. Jesus taught them to say teach us — it was given to a people. Miller called prayer the business of the church, not an add-on to the work of Christ; the Word we preach always goes out surrounded by prayer, and the Spirit convicts the world outside because he has first met us inside, where we pray together. In a real sense this whole service is that business: God calls and we answer, he shows us our sin and we confess, he speaks his Word and we receive it, he spreads the Table and we come. So the sermon itself is part of the prayer we are praying together — not a talk to take home and try alone. Praying by yourself and praying with the church feed each other: when you cannot pray, the people of God carry you; when you do pray alone, you come stronger to the gathering.
The family is larger than this room. Someone is hearing this in a car with the radio on, at a kitchen table, in a hospital bed far from any sanctuary. The church you cannot see is praying right now, and you belong inside it. Your Father is as near to that room as to this one. So pray where you are — the same short prayer, to the same Father.
None of this was invented by the church. It is older than the church — as old as the world. God walked with the first man and woman in the garden, in the cool of the day (Genesis 3:8). When they ran, he kept coming near — at altars, in a tent in the wilderness, in a temple of stone, in the prayers of his people all through their long story. Then the Son came near in person, God with us, and opened the way home. And now, Jesus told a woman at a well, the hour has come to worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem but in Spirit and in truth (John 4:21–24) — anywhere, in the Spirit he gives and the Son who is the truth. From the garden until now it is one thing: the God who is near, drawing his people near, teaching them to speak with him.
A life like this cannot stay private. People who discover that the Father gives himself, and gives day by day, become people who give thanks — and the thanks spills past the doors. This is not a beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. It is a beggar eating the bread of life (John 6:35) and handing over the very loaf in his hands, still feeding on it as he gives it away. We do not send the hungry off to search; we give them what we are eating.
This week we get to do exactly that. Seventy children are coming to us for Vacation Bible School; twenty-one leaders have come from Miami to teach them; many of you are giving the week to help. That is the church eating the bread of life and handing it to children. So ask your Father for it by name, all week — that these seventy children would meet him, that those leading and helping would be carried, that the bread we pass would be the bread of life. The work goes out on our knees.
So each day I keep asking — for him, not just his bread (Luke 11:3).
Conclusion
Keep asking your Father for daily bread (Luke 11:9). I ask for his bread, but not for him (Luke 11:11). In Christ my Father gives more than bread — his own Spirit (Luke 11:13). So each day I keep asking — for him, not just his bread (Luke 11:3).
That is the sermon in four sentences, and it turns on one surprise: keep asking, and the Father gives you himself. We hold out our hands for bread, and he fills them with the Giver. He keeps his gifts joined to himself — not to hold us off, but because the best thing he has to give is himself, and his love will not give us less.
The Son of God lived in prayer to his Father, and he teaches us to live there too — as his children and as his church, day by day. On our own we struggle even to watch one hour. But over the cross the Father has given us more than bread — himself, at the price of his own Son, so that even people the Bible calls evil can receive the Holy Spirit and call God Father. The fullness is already ours in Christ; prayer is how we live in it, one day at a time — drawn, at last, into the conversation God has always been having, Father, Son, and Spirit, now with us in it.
Here is the promise to carry and to claim: If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:13). And here is a way to pray it back — wherever you are hearing this, in a pew or a car or a sickbed, a prayer a child, a doubter, a lifelong saint, and someone far off can each pray, right where they are: Father, you know how to give good gifts to your children, and you have promised your Spirit to those who ask. I have come for your bread and stopped short of you. Turn me from using you to trusting you. Give me your Holy Spirit — cast out my fear, overturn my plans, reorder my loves, and fill the room with yourself. Have me, and have my day, and let your kingdom come — in me, and through us, and over all the earth. Amen.