Prayer - Ask for Anything? (Part Three)

Part Three - Ask, Seek and Knock
 

We're embarking, God willing, on a study of passages in the Bible - specifically the New Testament - that appear to promise that God will grant all our prayer requests. I will resist the temptation to recap again! The previous two introductory articles are still on the blog, and you should start with them if you have not already read them.

The first passage to look at is Matthew 7:7-11.

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; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 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 good gifts to those who ask him!

The first thing to note is that if you read carefully you cannot find a promise that we will receive everything that we ask for. Jesus says, "everyone who asks receives". He does not say, "everyone who asks receives everything he asks for".

The emphasis is on the asking, not on the receiving. We are being encouraged to ask, seek and knock. These are three degrees of requesting things from God. Sometimes we may just ask. Sometimes we may have to work a little harder and have to seek to find what we need from God. Sometimes we may have to knock, as if the door is closed. The point is that, however hard it seems to get through to God, He is always there waiting to answer us. If we ask He will answer. If we seek Him we will find Him. If we have to knock, He will most certainly open the door to us. Jesus is encouraging us that God loves us, and therefore we should not neglect to come to Him.

Secondly, Jesus argues from the lesser to the greater when He asks how a human father treats his son. Those of us who are parents, and those who know good parents, will see the parallel. If one of my children comes and asks for something, I will definitely give them something good. I want to give good things to my children. And that is true even though I am "evil" in comparison to the perfect God. It does not mean that I give my children everything they ask for. Sometimes they may ask for things that are good in themselves, but I may refuse because it may not be best at that time, or I may refuse because I have something better to give them.

I had an example of this in the last year. One of my children moved up from Primary to Secondary school this year. He desperately wanted to go to the Secondary school that most of his school friends were moving up to. He did not want to be separated from those friends. But Heidi and I knew that it would be better if he went to a different school. He pleaded with us constantly to change our minds and send him to his preferred school. It was heartbreaking! But the beginning of September came along, and he started his new school, and even after the first day he acknowledged that we had made the right decision. We denied his request, because we knew that we could give him something better.

I was going to say that God treats us like children, but it's more than that. We are God's adopted children. "See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are." (1 John 3:1) He knows what is good for us better than we do. He loves us better than we love our own children. He has infinitely more knowledge of the good things we need. And just as we would prefer to have parents who give us what is good for us, not just what we want, so we should have the same attitude towards God.

The point is that God, as our heavenly Father, knows the good that we need better than we do, and He loves to give us those good things. So we should always ask Him, as a child asks his father.

I remember another example where one of my children came to ask me for something, and he was wringing his hands nervously as he asked, as if he thought I would bite his head off. It brought a tear to my eye. I never want my children to be afraid to ask me for things. I just want them to know that I will only give them what I believe is good for them. And that is exactly what the point of this passage is. God does not want us to shy away from asking for things. He simply wants us to understand that He will only give us what is good for us. If we ask for something that fits in with that, He is only too happy to give it to us. It gives Him the same pleasure that I get in being able to give my children things that they ask for.

Finally, Jesus said these words in his "sermon on the mount", which runs all the way through chapters 5 to 7 in Matthew's gospel. We should always read things in context, and therefore we cannot ignore the rest of the sermon when we try to understand a part of it. And one of the things that is striking when you read the context is that less than ten verses earlier, in 6:33, Jesus introduces the idea of seeking. He says, "But seek first [God's] kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well."

He has been chiding us for worrying about earthly needs (6:25-34), having earthly treasures (6:19-24), and telling us that our highest need is to seek the kingdom of our heavenly Father. Then in 7:7 he tells us that if we seek then we will find. If we seek the kingdom of God we will find it. We are to be Godward in our asking, our seeking and our knocking, and He will not only bring us into His kingdom but give us many good and needful things (which are much less important) for this life as well.

At this point it's probably relevant to bring in the other passage I wanted to cover today, and that is Luke 11:9-10. It's exactly the same as Matthew 7:7-11, but in a slightly different context.

The parable that Jesus tells in the preceding verses in Luke 9:5-8 confirms what I said earlier:

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.'

Your friend will give you what you need simply because you ask boldly, even if not because he is your friend. God is greater than that, but the point is that you must ask boldly. Here again the asking, not the receiving, is the point of the passage.

But the particular thing to note with the teaching in Luke 9, is the way Jesus ends the section in verse 13: "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!"

Seeking first God's kingdom (Matthew 6:33), laying up treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:20), involves asking for the Holy Spirit. He is the one we need to make us into the people our Father wants us to be. He is the one, when we are tempted to worry about earthly things like where we will live, what we will wear or what we will eat, who will change our perspective. With Him we will be able to say with Jesus, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work." (John 4:34) That is truly seeking the kingdom of our heavenly Father, and when we seek we will find.

So to sum up what we have learnt from these two passages:

• We ought to be encouraged to ask God boldly for what we need;

• We ought humbly acknowledge God as our heavenly Father, who knows what is best for us and who loves us, and will give us what is best;

• We ought to pray for what will enable us to glorify our heavenly Father by seeking His kingdom before anything else;

• We ought to pray specifically for the Holy Spirit to fill us more and more.

And if you want further encouragement for your prayers, I'd commend to you John Piper's sermon on Matthew 7, which you can find at the following link: http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/sermons/ask-your-father-in-heaven

Next time we will, God willing, look at the first pre-requisite for our prayers, and that is to have faith.

Prayer - Ask for Anything? (Part Two)

Part Two - More Thoughts...

In Part One of this series I laid out a number of Bible verses, mostly quotes from Jesus himself, that seem to suggest that we should expect to receive everything that we ask for in prayer. I painstakingly studied each of these passages, asking myself whether that is really what they are trying to tell us, and if not what are we to learn?

I guess it's worth saying that my main conclusion is that we are not to expect that we will receive everything that we ask for in prayer. For one thing, we could state the obvious and say that if we pray for things that are sinful then we cannot expect to receive those. But also, two or more people may pray for good things that cannot be possible at the same time. David Needham tells a story that illustrates this in his book, Close to His Majesty (Multnomah Press, 1987):

Imagine two farmers in the USA: One raises wheat, and the other, just down the road, raises tomatoes. Both farmers have very large payments due on their mortgages. Everything hinges on harvest time. A crop failure would mean the loss of the farm. Let's complicate things a little more. In each family the farmer's wife is very sick and in need of expensive surgery. Without it, there is little hope of improvement. And one more thing: both families are faithfully walking with God.

It's evening. Each family listens intently to the weather forecast. There's a fifty-fifty chance of rain this particular night. The wheat farmer is well aware that his fields need one more heavy, soaking rain to bring the grain through to the harvest. With that, the farm could be theirs and his wife might be able to walk again.

Down the road, the other farmer knows that his tomatoes are right at their prime - ready to be harvested. But if the rains come, not only will his fields become a muddy bog, making it impossible to harvest, but also the moisture would trigger a blight that would destroy the entire crop. Without the harvest, they will lose everything.

After the weather report, each family gathers around the bed in the room where Mum is resting. Each family prays…

You get the picture. Some prayers conflict with each other, not in the sense of good things and bad things, but simply in the same sense as rain or not rain. God does not promise, in the Bible, to order everything miraculously in response to the wishes of His children - ordering everything to suit each individual, so that each individual had their own individual reality! Philosophically speaking, if miracles were the order of the day then there would be no such thing as miracles! So that is not the way God promises to work ordinarily. So there will, logically, always be some people who do not receive what they ask for.

Also, if God gave everything that we asked simply because we asked, then He would not be God. He would be akin to Aladdin's genie and we would be God! God is God, and we are subservient to Him, not the other way around. John Piper makes the point, in his sermon on Matthew 7:7-11 (http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/sermons/ask-your-father-in-heaven), that we should not want to receive everything we ask either. He says, "the reason I say that we would not want to get everything we asked is because we would then have to bear the burden of infinite wisdom which we do not have. We simply don’t know enough to infallibly decide how every decision will turn out and what the next events in our lives, let alone in history, should be."

Not only that, but there are examples in the Bible itself, where prayer requests go unfulfilled. I will skip the ones where persistent prayer requests are eventually granted - such as the women in the Old Testament who were barren and, after years of pleading with the Lord, they received the baby they had asked for - although we must not forget them.

Take, for example, Jesus on the night that He was betrayed. He prayed at Gethsemane, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will." (Matthew 26:39) That was a request that even the Son of God was not granted.

The other example I would mention is Paul, who was afflicted by what he called a "thorn in my flesh". We are not told exactly what it was, but we can deduce that it caused him some discomfort. He says, in 2 Corinthians 12:7ff, "To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassing great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'" Paul "pleaded" three times in prayer for relief from this affliction, and yet God did not grant his request.

However, these points aside, how should we look at passages that seem to suggest, or even clearly say, that we can, as Christians, ask the Lord for whatever we want, and He will grant our requests? I believe that the Bible is God's Word, and as such it is consistent, trustworthy and true. If I were to come to a conclusion that some Bible passages teach one thing and others show something mutually exclusive, then my confidence in the Bible would be undermined. Ultimately if I cannot have confidence in the Bible as God's Word, which it clearly teaches it is, then I could not have confidence in knowing the truth about God or His way of salvation through Jesus Christ. The stakes are that high.

Hence, we must look seriously at what the Bible says, and be able to reconcile different passages with each other. If we conclude that we are not necessarily to expect to receive everything we ask for in prayer, simply because we ask, then the question really is, what does God promise through Jesus and His apostles in relation to receiving what we ask for in prayer? I want to look more carefully at the words, and more carefully at the context, and find out what our mindset needs to be, so that we can have the right attitude and expectations.

So I hope to lead you through a study of the passages that I have studied, and show how I have come to conclusions I have reached. I will try to show why I don't think these passages teach that we should expect the granting of our requests automatically. But I also want, more positively, to draw out how these passages should challenge and change the way that we pray.

I have struggled to think of the best way to present these studies in a series of shortish blog articles, so that I can best share what I've learned. The method I've settled on is to go through passage by passage, drawing out applications at appropriate points. The headings I mentioned at the end of the last article will turn into application points, and may be augmented and adjusted as I go along. Sorry. It just shows what can happen when you publish bit by bit before you have actually finished the whole thing!

I hope that as I share what I've learnt we will all increase in confidence in the Scriptures and learn to pray in a way that brings glory to our Lord and Saviour.

And so yet again I have introduced the subject without going into the detail! Sorry. I promise we will dive straight into the detail next time, and you won't have to wait so long for that!