On the Road to Jerusalem: Ask, Seek, Find

“And I tell you, 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.”—Luke 11:9-10

On the road to Jerusalem, Jesus teaches us about the importance of prayer and seeking God. It’s amazing to think that God allows us to make requests of Him. And that He is willing to answer them. That’s what so many find unbelievable. Blaise Pascal, the great 17th century mathematician and philosopher, said that God established prayer to give His creatures the dignity of causality. God, in one of the mysteries of the universe, allows us to make requests of Him and He is willing to answer them. But what does that mean? Imagine for a moment that we are at the dinner table when I ask you to pass me the salt. Would you have passed it to me had I not asked? No. It is only because of my request that you passed it. And the same is true with God. He agrees to answer us when we call.

Now, this does not mean that God gives to us carte blanche. The apostle John explains,  

“And this is the confidence that we have toward Him, that if we ask anything according to His will He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of Him”—1 John 5:15. 

God will only answer according to that which is His will. If we ask for something outside of His will, such as something sinful, He will not answer. As James wrote,  

“You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions”—James 4:3.

Let’s imagine the dinner table again. God is at the head of the table and He is the host. Anything on the table is the will of God. God placed everything on the table, for our good and to be enjoyed, all in the proper time. We can ask of Him anything that is on the table and He will give it to us. But, imagine for a moment that what we want is dessert and we are eating salad. Will He give it to us? Is it on the table? Not yet. The dessert is still in the kitchen and will be brought out at the proper time. There are some things that are not on the table yet. He will give it to us, but in His time, and not until then. Once they are on the table, then we can ask, but until then, we cannot. We must wait, patiently. God will answer us when we pray to Him, as we pray according to His will and in accordance with His timing.

During Lent, we spend concentrated amounts of time in prayer and reading the Word. And we come expectantly. A sure sign of a weak faith and prayer life is that we fail to come to God expectantly. It’s not that we come with our grocery list of items that we simply check off as we go through them, no, we come with our requests, because God has told us to come with them. And it’s not that God doesn’t know what we need—He knows perfectly what we need (Matthew 6:8, 32; Luke 12:30). We come expectantly, in faith, because  

“without faith it is impossible to please Him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him”—Hebrews 11:6.

Are you coming to God expectantly in prayer? Are you praying according to the will of God? And in God’s perfect timing? Is there something in the way of you and God (cf. Psalm 66:18)? Ask God to give you a ready and willing heart of faith that comes to Him asking, seeking, and knocking. Amen.