“Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’  And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’  I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need” (Luke 11:5-8).
 
The parable of the Friend in Need (or the Friend at Midnight) appears in the Gospel of Luke immediately after Jesus gives his disciples the “Lord’s Prayer” and is clearly a continuation of his teaching on how to pray.  Three cultural aspects help explain the details of the parable. First, in the ancient Near East, ovens were fired and bread was usually baked in the early morning hours before the heat of the day – so by nightfall there might well be no bread left in a home, and people would borrow from their neighbors if more was needed. 

​Second, and also because of the heat of the days, it was not unusual for people to wait till evening to set out on a journey and to arrive at their destination later in the night. Finally, Near Eastern custom was such that if someone arrived at one’s home after a long journey, it would be regarded as shameful not to offer the person food.  This seems to be the situation in which the man in the parable finds himself, so he goes to his friend’s house late at night to request food for his guest.

The obvious lesson in the parable is that of persistence in prayer, something Jesus taught on multiple occasions, and in other parables such as that of the Persistent Widow.  But perhaps we may find other lessons in this particular parable as well.  For one thing, we see in the action of the friend that he was doing everything he could do himself – going to a friend’s house, even late at night, and asking tirelessly until he received a positive answer.

The Greek word which is translated “boldness” or “persistence” in some translations, regarding how the man continues to ask his friend’s help, is well translated as “shameless audacity” in the NIV – it really does convey an attitude that goes beyond simple persistence to a level which might even seem audacious or rude.  This, Jesus tells us, is the kind of persistence we should have in prayer — a confident boldness we also see in the story of the woman of Syrophoenicia who persisted in asking Jesus’ help till he rewarded her for exactly this attitude (Mark 7:25-30, Matthew 15:21-28 and see also Hebrews 4:16). 
​
But we should also remember a final detail of this parable: that it is not based on the friend needing bread for himself, but for someone else.  So an additional lesson we can  draw from this story is that we can often be the answer to someone else’s need. That is what intercessory prayer is all about, and this small parable reminds us to pray for others not only tirelessly, but also with true boldness.
                                                                 * * *
 See also the latest blog post on our Tactical Christianity website  here.

When we think of the biblical concept of rest, we probably think first of the Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:8-11), or Jesus’ words to his disciples:  “Come… apart … and rest a while” (Mark 6:31 ASV), but beyond this kind of resting by ceasing from activity, the Bible shows that our attitude also affects our ability to rest.

If we think about it, both the examples of rest given above involve humility – we have to be humble enough to accept God’s command to regularly rest, and we have to understand that we are not so important to the functioning of the world that we cannot step back and take additional rest when we need to do so.

In fact, the Bible shows that  full physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual rest is more than just the cessation of activity – we can stop work and still not find rest – and the Scriptures elaborate on this fact, showing there is a deep connection between rest and humility.  This is most clearly seen in Jesus’ words:  “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:28–29).   Although this is a scripture most Christians know well, we rarely focus on the relationship between the deep, fulfilling rest Christ promises, and the humility he says it is based upon. 

Yet if we look at the Scriptures carefully, we see this principle repeated often.  Sometimes we see it plainly in the grand sweep of biblical stories, just as Job only found rest and peace from his trials after finally being humbled. At other times we can see the principle in small details, as when King David wrote: “My heart is not proud, LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself” (Psalm 131:1–2).  

Hannah Anderson, author of the book Humble Roots (Moody, 2016), perfectly summarized the clear relationship between humility and rest this way: “[God] frees us from our burdens in the most unexpected way: He frees us by calling us to rely less on ourselves and more on Him. He frees us by calling us to humility.” And Anderson shows us why this is so:

“Pride convinces us that we are stronger and more capable than we actually are. Pride convinces us that we must do and be more than we are able. And when we try, we find ourselves feeling, ‘thin, sort of stretched… like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.’ … We begin to fall apart physically, emotionally, and spiritually for the simple reason that we are not existing as we were meant to exist.”

Sometimes circumstances prevent or delay proper rest, of course, but it is important that we do not continually live this way – and that we come to see rest not only as a divinely mandated responsibility, but also as a gift that we ignore to our own hurt.  If we live out our days in a lifestyle that avoids or diminishes rest, always struggling to increase some metric of our lives or never quite letting go of our own thoughts and pursuits, sooner or later we begin to experience the problems Humble Roots describes. 

The truth is, despite our striving and whatever our occupation, our work will never be done, and one of the Christian’s most basic life lessons must be that we will never experience true rest as long as we focus on what we need to do and to accomplish, instead of learning to rely on God and not ourselves. The sin of pride has been well defined as simply overestimating ourselves and underestimating God; and it is only as we learn to humbly put our own lives and concerns aside in rest that we acknowledge God’s true nature and our own, and see things in proper perspective.

The nineteenth-century clergyman and author, Phillips Brooks, once wrote: “The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.”  Rest not only allows us to do that, but also it helps us to do that.

Hebrews 4:9  tells us “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God” and although the rest indicated in this verse is primarily a future one, in the kingdom of God, the principle applies now also.  We must remind ourselves that the will of God is not that we should work endlessly in this life and then enjoy rest later, but that we should experience the rest and peace in this life that reflects the rest and peace we will have in eternity.
​
We humble ourselves by resting physically and spiritually, and – as Christ himself promised – as we learn humility, we find rest.