Pray Shamelessly

By Daniel Stefanski

Published November 10, 2025

The Lord’s Prayer is the essential model prayer for believers seeking to pray and grow in their effectiveness and enjoyment of prayer. As we have seen in previous posts, the kind of prayer God hears and answers is driven by a desire for holiness. When we pray with the theme of holiness running through our prayers, the effect upon ourselves and those around us will be significant. Our holiness-driven prayers will be formed by God’s will, leading to effectiveness as He accomplishes His saving and sanctifying work.

The Lord’s Prayer, then, is God’s marvelous gift to us. As with all God’s gracious gifts, however, we easily can abuse, mar, pervert, and ruin them so we do not profit by them. So it is with the Lord’s Prayer. When Jesus gave us the Lord’s Prayer, He was not intending to give us a rote prayer to recite, as if it were a magic phrase. In fact, Christ forbid His disciples from meaninglessly repeating words and phrases. We see, perhaps, no clearer illustration of this vain repetition than the Roman Catholic praying of the rosary, but evangelicals also have our thoughtless prayers and conventions.

We must remember that in this prayer, Jesus desires to shape our content, but He does not stop with this teaching. The second major lesson Christ introduces is our conduct in prayer – and the lesson is quite stunning with the parable of the midnight visitor (Luke 11:5-8). We see through this teaching that our conduct in prayer must not be merely conventional but desperately shameless.

Let’s look at this parable to see this truth, beginning with the shameless prayer explained (verses 5-7).

This parable teaches us about our conduct in prayer – how we are to go about asking God for provisions in times of need. Here is a rather simple story – one we can all understand. One night a visitor unexpectedly shows up at the subject’s house around midnight. This visit was a big disturbance, and the host had no food for the traveler. However, he had a nearby friend who has freshly baked bread. The dilemma, though, facing the host, was whether to be a bad host and not feed the traveler or a bad friend by asking the neighbor for some bread at this late hour.

The host decided to ask his friend for food, but the neighbor rejects the request. Personally, the friend doesn’t want to help for several reasons. This neighbor concludes the man has not only asked for something inconvenient but for the impossible. It’s important to recognize at this point in the parable that prayer is always asking God to do the impossible.  This man coming to his friend’s house looking for bread knew what he was asking was basically impossible – at least for all practical purposes. However, prayer is the cry of desperation, coming to God to say, “I cannot make this work on my own; I need the impossible.”

What we have here, then, is a man moved by desperation, acting shamelessly. He will inconvenience whomever he needs to in order to get what he needs, because he is desperate – and his desperation has made him shameless. This is the illustration of shameless prayer via a parable.

Believers might ponder here that it almost seems wrong to think of treating God this way. This conundrum brings us to the encouragement of shameless prayer (verse 8).

Jesus encourages shameless prayer by noting that shameless prayer gets results. The friendship in the parable was not enough to motivate the neighbor to fulfill any of the host’s requests, because the request defied all conventions and expectations. However, what would motivate the sleeper to rise and give what was requested was the man’s persistence. The idea here is not primarily persistence but desperate shamelessness. The man was so desperate, and he lacked any shame to put him off his quest, that it was best just to give him what he wanted and send him along.

We have a really good illustration of shamelessness in Scripture when David was dancing with joy as the ark of God was brought into Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6:16-23). There, David wasn’t worried about those around him or conventional appropriateness with his celebration; he was going to worship the Lord with fullness of joy, all his heart, and desperate shamelessness for God’s presence and power.

When we understand the backdrop of Jesus’ culture and prayer in that culture, this interpretation makes even more sense to the reader. In Christ’s culture, prayer was often very formal. However, the Lord came along to tell people they had to be shameless and willing to break conventions if they really wanted to pray to their God in heaven. They had to be desperate and come hungry for the Creator’s holiness. They needed to forget what men thought was proper with all the religious rules they created for the people.

It’s important to add that Christ’s intent was not for some external action in prayer that would be shameless, embarrassing, or unconventional. What is meant by shameless is not so much our behavior on the outside. The issue with the man at midnight in the parable wasn’t his physical posture or manner, but his willingness to ask at such an inconvenient time and the desperation that drove him to his neighbor’s home. Jesus is saying that our heart’s desire should be so desperate that we are willing to come to God any time, day or night, and in any situation, to make our requests known to the Lord. We should have the attitude that says, “God, I don’t care what time it is. I don’t care what’s going on. I don’t care what the situation is. I’m coming to You in prayer because I’m desperate and need the impossible.”

The good news is that God is not like the sleeping neighbor. He never sleeps, and He is not merely our friend; He is our Father. Understand that the perception of inconvenience is on our side when it comes to God. The encouragement from the parable is to come to the Lord whenever there is a need, with desperation and trust that He will answer us when we come this way. Here, we might think of the story of Hannah in the Old Testament. The situation surrounding her lack of children seemed impossible, and she was desperate. She knew, though, that no time is a bad time for God, and that He hears the desperate pleas of His children. The Lord gives us what we need in response to our cries to Him.

Our conduct in prayer should be characterized by desperate shamelessness. We come to God in prayer desperate because of our circumstances and lack of resources to resolve them, and shameless to ask the Lord to do the impossible, because we know that is His specialty.

All these truths are meaningless, however, if we don’t have the right content in prayer. In fact, it seems Jesus links this parable with His prayer because what is at issue is the third petition: daily bread. We can be desperate for the wrong things, and God will not grant them to us. We can be shameless and bold and run to God when it seems inopportune, but if our prayers are not dominated by a desire for holiness – for God’s will – our requests are going to be a lot of noise, and that’s it. However, when we pray biblical content, with conduct characterized by desperate shamelessness before God and utter humility before Him, those prayers are effective, accomplishing much and achieving the impossible.