Big Idea: It is our personal relationship with God that should take priority in our lives; those who know God as Father can pray to him with full confidence.

Understanding the Text

Prayer, and especially Jesus’s practice of prayer, is a prominent theme for Luke. He has portrayed Jesus at prayer already in 3:21; 5:16; 6:12; 9:18, 28–29, indicating that this was an important part of his way of life. Those passages record the fact of Jesus’s frequent prayer rather than its content. But in 10:21–22 we have heard Jesus in prayer to his Father, and we have been told of the intimate relationship shared by the Father and the Son. The disciples have become aware of this special relationship expressed in Jesus’s prayers, and they want to share it. Remarkably, without compromising the uniqueness of…