THE ASSURANCE OF THE ANSWER
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ASK
ASK
7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
8 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
3 Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.
Our Lord returns here in the Sermon on the Mount a second time to speak of prayer. The first time He spoke of the Father Who is to be found in secret and rewards openly, He gave us the pattern prayer (Matt. vi. 5-15 He wants to teach us what in all Scripture is considered the chief thing in prayer: the assurance that prayer will be heard and answered. Observe how He uses words that mean almost the same thing, and each time repeats the promise so distinctly: 'Ye shall receive, ye shall find, it shall be opened unto you;' and then gives as ground for such assurance the law of the kingdom: 'He that asketh, receiveth; he that seeketh, findeth; to him that knocketh, it shall be opened.' In this sixfold repetition, we cannot but feel how He wants to impress deep on our minds this one truth that we may and must most confidently expect an answer to our prayer. Next to the revelation of the Father's love, there is, in the whole course of the school of prayer, not a more important lesson than this: Everyone that asketh, receiveth.
5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.
8 Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.
9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
14 For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:
15 But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
A difference in meaning has been sought in the three words the Lord uses, ask, seek, and knock. If such was His purpose, the first, ASK, refers to the gifts we pray for. But I may ask and receive the gift without the Giver. SEEK is the word Scripture uses of God Himself; Christ assures me that I can find Himself. But it is not enough to find God in time of need, without coming to abiding fellowship: KNOCK speaks of admission to dwell with Him and in Him. Asking and receiving the gift would thus lead to seeking and finding the Giver, and this again to the knocking and opening of the door of the Father's home and love. One thing is sure: the Lord does want us to count most certainly on it that asking, seeking, knocking, cannot be in vain: receiving an answer, finding God, the opened heart, and home of God are the certain fruit of prayer.
That the Lord should have thought it needful in so many forms to repeat the truth, is a lesson of deep import. It proves that He knows our hearts, how doubt and distrust toward God are natural, and how easily we are inclined to rest in prayer as a religious work without an answer. He knows how, even when we believe that God is the Hearer of prayer, believing prayer that lays hold of the promise is something spiritual, too high, and difficult for the half-hearted disciple. He, therefore, at the very outset of His instruction to those who would leam to pray, seeks to lodge this truth deep into their hearts: prayer does avail much; ask and ye shall receive; everyone that asketh, receiveth. This is the fixed, eternal law of the kingdom: if you ask and receive not, it must be because there is something amiss or wanting in the prayer. Hold on; let the Word and the Spirit teach you to pray aright, but do not let go of the confidence He seeks to waken: Everyone that asketh, receiveth.
'Ask, and it shall be given you.' Christ has no mightier stimulus to persevering prayer in His school than this. A child has to prove a sum to be correct, so the proof that we have prayed aright is, the answer. If we ask and receive not, it is because we have not learned to pray aright.
Therefore, let every learner in the school of Christ take the Master’s word in all simplicity: Everyone that asketh, receiveth. He had good reasons for speaking so unconditionally. Let us beware of weakening the Word with our human wisdom. When He tells us heavenly things, let us believe Him: His Word will explain itself to him who believes it fully: If questions and difficulties arise, let us not seek to settle them before we accept the Word. No, let us entrust them all to Him: it is His work to solve them: our work is first and fully to accept and hold fast to His promise. Let in our inner chamber, in the inner chamber of our heart too; the Word be inscribed in letters of light: Everyone that asketh, receiveth.
According to this teaching of the Master, prayer consists of two parts and has two sides, a human and a Divine. The human is the asking, the Divine is the giving. Or, to look at both from the human side, there is the asking and the receiving- the two halves that make up a whole.
It is as if He would tell us that we are not to rest without an answer because it is the will of God, the rule in the Father's family: every childlike believing petition is granted. If no answer comes, we are not to sit down in the sloth that calls itself resignation and suppose that it is not God's will to answer. No, there must be something in the prayer that is not as God would have it, childlike and believing; we must seek grace to pray so that the answer may come. It is far easier for the flesh to submit without the answer than to yield itself to be searched and purified by the Spirit until it has learned to pray the prayer of faith.
It is one of the terrible marks of the diseased state of Christian life these days that so many rest content without the distinct experience of an answer to prayer. They pray daily, ask many things, and trust that some of them will be heard, but know little of direct, definite answers to prayer as the rule of daily life.
And it is this the Father wills: He seeks daily intercourse with His children in listening to and granting their petitions. He wills that I should come to Him daily with distinct requests; He wills day by day to do for me what I ask.
It was in His answer to prayer that the saints of old learned to know God as the Living One, and were stirred to praise and love (Ps. xxxiv:19
19 Many are the afflictions of the righteous: But the Lord delivereth him out of them all.
Our Teacher waits to imprint this upon our minds: prayer and its answer, the child asking and the father giving, belong to each other.
There may be cases where the answer is a refusal, because the request is not according to God's Word, as when Moses asked to enter Canaan.
But still, there was an answer: God did not leave His servant uncertain about His will. The gods of the heathen are dumb and cannot speak. Our Father lets His child know when He cannot give him what he asks, and he withdraws his petition, even as the Son did in Gethsemane.
Both Moses the servant and Christ the Son knew that what they asked was not according to what the Lord had spoken: their prayer was the humble supplication whether it was not possible for the decision to be changed. God will teach those who are teachable and give Him time, by His Word and Spirit, whether their request be accord. ing to His will or not. Let us withdraw the request, if it be not according to God's mind, or persevere till the answer comes. Prayer is appointed to obtain the answer. It is in prayer and its answer that the interchange of love between the Father and His child takes place.
How deep our heart’s estrangement from God must be, and how difficult it must be to grasp such promises. While we accept the words and believe their truth, the faith of the heart that fully has them and rejoices in them comes so slowly. It is because our spiritual life is still so weak, and the capacity for taking God's thoughts is so feeble. But let us look to Jesus to teach us as none but He can teach.
If we take His words in simplicity and trust Him by His Spirit to make them within us life and power, they will so enter into our inner being that the spiritual Divine reality of the truth they contain will indeed take possession of us. We shall not rest content until every petition we offer is borne heavenward on Jesus' own words: 'Ask, and it shall be given you.'
Beloved fellow disciples in the school of Jesus! Let us set ourselves to learn this lesson well. Let us take these words just as they were spoken. Let us not suffer human reason to weaken their force. Let us take them as Jesus gives them, and believe them. He will teach us how to understand them fully in time: let us begin by implicitly believing them.
Let us take time, as often as we pray, to listen to His voice: Everyone who asks receives.
Let us not make the feeble experiences of our unbelief the measure of what our faith may expect. Let us seek, not only just in our seasons of prayer, but at all times, to hold fast the joyful assurance: man's prayer on earth and God's answer in heaven are meant for each other. Let us trust Jesus to teach us so to pray that the answer can come. He will do it, if we hold fast the word He gives today: 'Ask, and ye shall receive.'
Matthew 7:9-11
In these words, the Lord further confirms what he has said of the certainty of the answer to prayer. To remove all doubt and show us on what sure ground His promise rests, He appeals to what everyone has seen and experienced here on earth. We are all children and know what we expected of our fathers. We are fathers, or continually see them; and everywhere we look upon it as the most natural thing there can be, for a father to hear his child. And the Lord asks us to look up from earthly parents, of whom the best are but evil, and to calculate HOW MUCH MORE the heavenly Father will give good gifts to them that ask Him. Jesus would lead us up to see, that as much greater as God is than sinful man, so much greater our assurance ought to be that He will more surely than any earthly father grant our childlike petitions. As much greater as God is than man, so much surer is it that prayer will be heard with the Father in heaven than with a father on earth.
As simple and intelligible as this parable is, so deep and spiritual is the teaching it contains. The Lord would remind us that a child’s prayer owes its influence entirely to the relation in which he stands to the parent. The prayer can exert that influence only when the child is living in that relationship, in the home, in the love, and in the Father’s service. The power of the promise, 'Ask, and it shall be given you,' lies in the loving relationship between us as children and the Father in heaven; when we live and walk in that relationship, the prayer of faith and its answer will be the natural result. And so the lesson we have today in the school of prayer is this: Live as a child of God, then you will be able to pray as a child, and as a child you will most assuredly be heard.
And what is the true child life? The answer can be found in any home. The child that by preference forsakes the father's house, finds no pleasure in the presence, love, and obedience of the father, and still thinks about asking and obtaining what he will, will surely be disappointed. On the contrary, he to whom the intercourse and will and honour and love of the father are the joy of his life, will find that it is the father's joy to grant his requests. Scripture says, 'As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the children of God:' the childlike privilege of asking all is inseparable from the childlike life under the leading of the Spirit.
He that gives himself to be led by the Spirit in his life, will be led by Him in his prayers too. He will find that Fatherlike giving is the divine response to childlike living.
To see what this childlike living is, in which childlike asking and believing have their ground, we have only to notice what our Lord teaches in the Sermon on the Mount of the Father and His children. In it the prayer-promises are imbedded in the life-precepts; the two are inseparable. They form one whole, and He alone can count on the fulfillment of the promise, who accepts to all that the Lord has connected with it. It is as if in speaking the word, 'Ask, and ye shall receive, He says: I give these promises to those whom in the beatitudes I have pictured in their childlike poverty and purity, and of whom I have said,
"They shall be called the children of God' (Matt. v. 3-9): to children, who 'let your light so shine before men, that they may... glorify your Father which is in heaven!' to those who walk in love, 'that ye may be children of your Father which is in heaven, (v. 45) and who seek to be perfect 'even as your Father in heaven is perfect' : to those whose fasting in prayer and almsgiving is not before men, but before your father, which is in secret, who forgive even as your father, forgive you giveth you' (vi. 15); who trust the heavenly Father in all earthly need, seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (vi. 26-33); who not only say, Lord, Lord, but do the will of my Father which is in heaven (vii. 21). Such are the children of the Father, and such is the life in the Father's love and service; in such a child-life answered prayers are certain and abundant.
But will not such teaching discourage the feeble one? If we are first to answer to this portrait of a child, must not many give up all hope of answers to prayer? The difficulty is removed if we think again of the blessed name of father and child. A child is weak; there is a great difference between the ages and gifts of children. The Lord does not demand of us a perfect fulfillment of the law; no, but only the childlike and whole-hearted surrender to live as a child with Him in obedience and truth.
Nothing more. But also, nothing less. The Father must have the whole heart. When this is given, and He sees the child with honest purpose and steady will seeking in everything to be and live as a child, then our prayer will count with Him as a child’s prayer. Let anyone simply and honestly begin to study the Sermon on the Mount and take it as his guide in life. He will find, notwithstanding weakness and failure, an ever-growing liberty to claim the fulfillment of its promises concerning prayer. In the names of father and child, he has the pledge that his petitions will be granted.
This is the one chief thought on which Jesus dwells here, and which He would have all His scholars take in. He would have us see that the secret of effectual prayer is: to have the heart filled with the Father-love of God. It is not enough for us to know that God is a Father: He would have us take time to understand what that name implies. We must take the best earthly father we know; we must think of the tenderness and love with which he regards the request of his child, the love and joy with which he grants every reasonable desire; we must then, as we think in adoring worship of the infinite Love and Fatherliness of God, consider with how much more tenderness and joy He sees us come to Him, and gives us what we ask aright. And then, when we see how much this Divine arithmetic is beyond our comprehension and feel how impossible it is for us to apprehend God’s readiness to hear us, then He would have us come and open our hearts for the Holy Spirit to shed abroad God's Father-love there. Let us do this not only when we want to pray but also yield our hearts and lives to dwell in that love. The child who only wants to know the love of the father when he has something to ask, will be disappointed. But he who lets God be Father always and in everything, who would fain live his whole life in the Father's presence and love, who allows God in all the greatness of His love to be a Father to him, oh! he will experience most gloriously that a life in God's infinite Fatherliness and continual answers to prayer are inseparable.
Beloved fellow disciple, we begin to see why we know so little about daily answers to prayer and what the chief lesson is that the Lord has for us in His school. It is all in the name of Father.
We thought of new and deeper insight into some of the mysteries of the prayer world as what we should get in Christ’s school. He tells us the first is the highest lesson; we must learn to say well, 'Abba, Father!' Our Father which art in heaven.' He that can say this, has the key to all prayer. In all the compassion with which a father listens to his weak or sickly child, in all the joy with which he hears his stammering child, in all the gentle patience with which he bears with a thoughtless child, we must, as in so many mirrors, study the heart of our Father, until every prayer be borne upward on the faith of this Divine word: 'How much more shall your heavenly Father give good gifts to them that ask Him'
'Your Father which is in heaven.' Alas! we speak of it only as the utterance of a reverential homage. We think of it as a figure borrowed from an earthly life, and only in some faint and shallow meaning to be used of God. We are afraid to take God as our own tender and pitiful father. He is a schoolmaster, or almost farther off than that, and knows less about us—an inspector who knows nothing of us except through our lessons. His eyes are not on the scholar but the book, and all alike must meet the standard.
Now open the ears of the heart, timid child of God; let it go, sinking right down into the innermost depths of the soul. Here is the starting point of holiness, in the love and patience and pity of our heavenly Father. We do not have to learn to be holy as a hard lesson at school that we may make God think well of us; we are to learn it at home with the Father to help us. God loves you not because you are clever, not because you are good, but because He is your Father. The Cross of Christ does not make God love us; it is the outcome and measure of His love to us.
He loves all His children, the clumsiest, the dullest, the worst of His children. His love lies at the back of everything, and we must get upon that as the solid foundation of our religious life, not growing up into that, but growing up out if it. We must begin there or our beginning will come to nothing. Do take hold of this mightily. We must go out of ourselves for any hope, or any strength, or any confidence. And what hope, strength, and confidence may be ours now that we begin here, your Father which is in heaven!
We need to get in at the tenderness and helpfulness which lie in these words, and to rest upon it-your Father. Speak them over to yourself until something of the wonderful truth is felt by us. It means that I am bound to God by the closest and tenderest relationship; I have a right to His love, power, and blessing, such as nothing else could give me. O the boldness with which we can draw near! O the great things we have a right to ask for! Your Father. It means that all His infinite love and patience and wisdom bend over me to help me. In this relationship lies the possibility of holiness; there is infinitely more than that.
Here we are to begin, in the patient love of our Father. Think how He knows us apart and by ourselves, in all our peculiarities, and in all our weaknesses and difficulties. The master judges by the result, but our Father judges by the effort. Failure does not always mean fault. He knows how much things cost and weighs them where others only measure. YOUR FATHER. Think how great store His love sets by the poor beginnings of the little ones, clumsy and unmeaning as they may be to others. All this lies in this blessed relationship and infinitely more. Do not fear to take it all as your own.
'LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY'
O Lord Jesus! teach me to understand and believe what Thou hast now promised me. It is not hid from Thee, O my Lord, with what reasonings my heart seeks to satisfy itself, when no answer comes. There is the thought that my prayer is not in harmony with the Father's secret counsel, that there is perhaps something better Thou wouldest give me, or that prayer as fellowship with God is blessing enough without an answer.
And yet, my blessed Lord, I find in Thy teaching on prayer that Thou didst not speak of these things but said so plainly, that prayer may and must expect an answer. Thou dost assure us that this is the fellowship of a child with the Father: the child asks, and the Father gives.
Blessed Lord! Thy words are faithful and true. It must be, because I pray amiss, that my experience of answered prayer is not clearer. It must be, because I live too little in the Spirit, that my prayer is too little in the Spirit, and that the power for the prayer of faith is wanting.
Lord! teach me to pray. Lord Jesus! I trust Thee for it; teach me to pray in faith. Lord! teach me this lesson of today: Everyone that asketh receiveth. Amen.