Photo Source: www.creationswap.com by Matt Gruber
God wants to help us in our need and bless us in our desires. Jesus instructs us to Knock Seek and Ask, because God’s desire is to answer our prayers. He said, ” If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” Matthew 7:11.
In Luke 11 the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, and He tells the story of a man who has a guest arrive unexpectedly late at night, but he has no bread to offer him as a good host should. He know his neighbor has some bread, so he goes next door and keeps knocking and knocking and asking for bread until finally he gets up and gives him some. The picture is that as reluctantly as the neighbor gave, God will give so much more graciously, if only we would ask.
But God does want us to ask. He tells us to knock, to see, and to ask. Yes, God knows what we have need of before we ask, yet Jesus teaches his disciples to pray day by day for daily bread. And He wants us to pray for one another. So many of Paul’s letters open or close with him saying he is praying for that congregation, and asking them to pray in turn for him. And he writes in Galatians 6:2 that we should bear one another’s burdens. Just as the neighbor helped provide bread for the unexpected guest.
How often do I fail at this? How many times do I succeed? Do I hear the prayer request my brother or sister in the church had the courage to share but I immediately forget it? Too many times we say, I’ll pray for you, but don’t. Cultivate the habit of praying right then. Pray only if it’s a sentence or two asking for God to help and intervene and provide for the need. In this way you help bear the burden.
How mysterious are God’s ways. He can heal and deliver, and yet he wants us to ask and pray. I’m reminded of the story of the man at the pool (in John 5) where once a year an angel came down and stirred the water, and the first person in the pool would get healed. There was always a crowd there waiting for their miracle when one day Jesus walks up and, seemingly at random, picks a guy out and asks, “do you want to be healed?”
He was obviously at the pool waiting to be healed. In fact he was so sick he couldn’t walk very well and every year for 38 years someone else always got into the pool before him for their healing. Jesus healed him, but first he asked, “do you want to be healed?”
In the book of James it is written, “Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord… Confess your faults to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much” James 5:14,16.
God knows what we need. He knows our sicknesses and our sins. He knows the good things we desire for ourselves and those we love. And he asks us to pray and fast like Daniel for 21 days waiting for an answer, like Jesus in the garden sweating drops of blood, like Mary and Martha with tears and even anger at the death of their brother Lazarus, like the heroes of faith in Hebrews chapter 11.
I don’t understand why God wants us to pray and fast and to seek Him. Maybe if He just did it all without us asking we would lose that connection to Him that He desires. After all He does love us and wants us to spend time with Him and bring Him our desires and hurts and our cares.
“Be careful (or anxious) for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God” Philippians 4:6.
“Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart” Psalm 37:4.