You Ask & Will Receive

JESUS SAID, “I TELL YOU TO ASK AND YOU WILL RECEIVE. SEARCH, AND YOU WILL FIND. KNOCK, AND THE DOOR WILL BE OPENED FOR YOU.” Luke 11.9,10.

Many Christians do not take these words of the Lord Jesus Christ as a literal promise! I am afraid, you and I also take these words of the Lord with ‘a pinch of doubt!’ Probably we are not to be totally blamed for it! Many of our prayers have gone ‘unanswered!’ How then, can we really believe ‘the blanket offer’ of the Lord to ‘hear all our prayers?’

If Jesus had qualified His promise and said, ‘Some of the things we ask for, we will receive’, we could have easily believed! But Jesus makes a categoric offer with no bars or limits! According to that promise, you and I have asked for many things, fully believing that we would receive them. But we haven’t! So not to shake out faith too much, we take the easy way out. We pray for whatever we want. If we get them, we thank God for them. When we do not receive what we ask for, we are sad and disappointed and try to forget about it! But we slowly lose our faith in the promise. We faint and we do not persist in our prayers. We no longer have the faith to do so.

Dear friend, instead of losing faith in the Lord’s precious promise to answer your prayers, you must fully believe it. Don’t make your faith dependent on your experience. Rather, put your trust in a faithful God and His unchanging promises. Jesus laboured to explain the need for you to believe and persist in prayer in order to receive answers to your prayers. In order to emphasise it, He described prayer by three different terms: Ask; Seek; Knock. It is not mere repetition. He was telling that you could and should increase the intensity of your prayer. He then reassured us by saying, “Everyone who asks will receive, etc.” Jesus encourages you to brace yourself up in prayer and go ahead and keep asking, seeking and knocking!

So persistent was Jesus in His insistence that you should ask and keep asking. Hence, He also added a simple example from everyday life. He told 'how a sleepy, reluctant man' would get up at midnight and give you, his friend, whatever you asked and much more, because you kept asking and knocking!

The Lord could have stopped with that story, but He didn't! He knew you and I needed more convincing arguments that touched our very skin! He said, "If your child asks you, his father, for a fish, would you give him a snake instead? Or if your child asks you for an egg, would you give him a scorpion? Even though you are evil, you know how to give good gifts to your children. So how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit (good gifts) to those who ask him?” (vs 11-13).

Instead of losing your faith in prayer, you need to try and understand ‘why your prayers are not answered!’ It is because you think that your prayer is answered ‘only when you get what you asked for!’ You need to keep believing that ‘God keeps His promise and answers ‘all’ our prayers’. God’s answer could be ‘Yes to what you asked' or 'Yes the way He thinks it good for you in the final count' or 'Wait'. God cannot say ‘No!’ Do not take ‘Wait’ for a ‘No’. Keep praying! He will always give something better in His reckoning! If God does not keep His promise, He cannot be God!

Pray and practise with me: Dear Lord, help me to believe that You always keep Your promise and answer my prayers. Help me to keep on praying and not faint. Amen.