To Encourage You

Matthew 7:7-11 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

When you pray, do you ask God for things?  You should, for the Lord has told us to pray about everything (Philippians 4:6).  In the very familiar words from what we call “The Lord’s Prayer,” Jesus told us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”  But what else should we ask for? 

In the verses above from Matthew 7, which come at the tail end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus clearly tells us to ask and it will be given to us.  Seems like a blank check, doesn’t it?  Yet, in James 4:3 it says, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”  So, what’s going on here?  Is the Bible contradicting itself? Some people say that it does. 

Well, to answer this, we must look a little closer at what Jesus said in Matthew 7.  It’s true that He did say that if we ask it will be given to us. However, He didn’t stop there. He gives us an example to clarify what He is saying. He likens it to a child asking his father for something. He says that if he asks for bread the father won’t give him a stone. In other words, if the child is hungry and asks his father for something to eat, his father won’t give him something that he can’t eat, like a stone.  He then says that if the child asks for a fish, which at that time was one of the “clean” foods according to Jewish law, he wouldn’t give him something that was “unclean” like a snake (Leviticus 11:41), or worse yet, that could actually hurt him, again, like a snake. Taken another way, what father who loves his child would give him or her a poisonous snake to play with if their child asked him for it, for such a gift is not a good thing.  In other words, what Jesus is telling us is that He will give us what we ask for if what we ask for is a good thing, i.e., good in His sight, for He knows what is truly good for us.  That’s why, as it says in James, God won’t give us things that we ask for when we are asking with bad motives, motives like that of lust, which is a sin. 

So, when you pray, are you making it a habit to ask for good things – good things, that is, in God’s sight? And how do you know what such things are? Again, let’s look at the Sermon on the Mount, which is the context from which the verses above came.  Note, again, that these verses come near the end of the sermon.  In chapters 5-7 of Matthew, Jesus is describing what the life of the “blessed” look like.  He begins by telling us that the truly blessed people on earth are those that are poor in spirit, i.e., they recognize that they are very needy, spiritually speaking. They are those who mourn, for they long for that which they lack, again, spiritually speaking. They are the meek, willingly submissive to their Master in heaven. They are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for surely true righteousness is a very good thing in God’s eyes.  They are those who are merciful, pure in heart, and the list goes on to name more good attributes of those who would follow God.  Then Jesus differentiates the evil from the good in a wide array of areas in life.  He talks about salt that is good and useful with that which has lost its savor and is useless. He is talking about how those who call themselves believers should live like believers, or else their belief is worthless for anything good. He explains what adultery is, in that it includes our thoughts as well as our actions.  As such, it isn’t good enough to just not commit adultery in a physical sense, for it’s just as evil to commit adultery in our heart. He talks about how people can pray, fast, and give in a bad way, i.e., when they do so just to draw attention to themselves.  He tells us that a love that is just directed towards those who love us is not how He loves, for He loves even those who don’t love Him.   Jesus continues in this vein, differentiating the evil from the good, and then at the end He calls on us to ask, seek, and knock, i.e., to seek after those good things that He has just gone on about at length. It is these things that are truly good in God’s eyes. It is these things that He is more than willing to give us. 

If we really want to love Him and love our neighbor as ourselves, if we really want to glorify God in all of life, if we really want to worship Him in Spirit and in Truth, then we should ask Him to enable us to do these things.  If we really hunger and thirst for the good things that He so longs for us to have, thinks like righteousness, then He will provide them to us.  And if we truly hunger and thirst for these things, we’ll be doing all we can to have them. We’ll study His Word, striving to understand how He wants us to think and live, and we’ll do all in our power to obey Him.  But we’ll also ask.  We won’t rely on our own strength, for we’ll know that it is impossible to live a life that truly glorifies God without the power only He can give us to do so.   

May God help us to ask, seek, and knock for the truly good things that He wants to give us. And may the Lord give us His desires so that we will ask for such things, for it is the desires of His heart that are truly the very best things for us, not only in this life but also in the next.