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Ask Whatever You Wish
May 7, 2006
John 15:7
 
The /British Press Association/ reported this strange incident:
A British submarine lay disabled on the ocean floor.
After two days, hope of raising her was abandoned.
The crew on orders of the commanding officer began singing:
"Abide with me!
Fast falls the eventide,
The darkness deepens—
Lord, with me abide!
When other helpers
Fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless,
Oh, abide with me!"
The officer explained to the men that they did not have long to live.
There was no hope of outside aid, he said, because the surface searchers did not know the vessel's position.
Sedative pills were distributed to the men to quiet their nerves.
One sailor was affected more quickly than the others, and he swooned.
He fell against a piece of equipment and set in motion the submarine's jammed surfacing mechanism.
The submarine went to the surface and made port safely.
If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it shall be done for you.
Our focus this morning is verse 7, /"If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it shall be done for you."/
The verse has two halves, a condition and a result.
The condition--the if clause--is "If you abide in me and my words abide in you . .
."
The result--the then clause--"then ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you."
Last week we talked about the condition--especially the meaning of Jesus' words abiding in us.
If we are to have consistent answers to prayer, the words of Jesus must abide in us.
That is, as we saw from verses 4 and 5, Jesus himself must abide in us.
We do not just stock ourselves once, but we receive and believe and remember and meditate on the truths that he spoke once and is speaking now as he abides in us.
We must restock ourselves continually.
Just as your food shelves at home need restocking periodically, so does our need for an infilling of God’s Word.
Today I want to focus on the result clause of verse 7/--"ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you."/
If the words of Jesus abide in us, then the result will be that you pray with power and effectiveness.
There are four truths about prayer that come from meditating on this verse from the writings of John.
First of all, prayer is for fruit-bearing.
God designed prayer to give his disciples the joy of bearing fruit while God himself gets the glory.
We can see this in the connection between verses 7 and 8 and then in verse 16: (v.7) /If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it shall be done for you./
(v.
8) By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples.
Then in verse 16 He repeats /“I appointed you to produce lasting fruit so that the Father will give you what you ask for …”/
In John's way of writing the phrase "by this" at the beginning of verse 8  refers backward to verse 7 and forward to the rest of verse 8. /"By this is my Father glorified"--/that is, by your asking him for things and his giving them to you.
He gets glory as the one who is rich and good enough to answer prayer./
"By this is my Father glorified"/--that is, that you bear much fruit and He is glorified.
God gets glory when we bear much fruit.
Therefore the primary point of prayer is to glorify God by fruit-bearing.
Our fruit glorifies God.
This is confirmed explicitly in verse 16.
Let’s look at it again.
Jesus says to his disciples, /"You did not choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he may give to you."/
The logical connection between the two parts of this verse are tremendously important.
Jesus says that he chose and appointed his disciples that they should go and bear fruit that remains . . .
/"that (in order that) whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he may give it to you."/
Shortened down it says, /"I have given you a fruit-bearing mission in order that your prayers might be answered!”/
This only makes sense if prayer is for fruit-bearing.
You would expect the verse to be just the reverse: God will give you what you ask in order that you might have a fruit-bearing mission.
But Jesus says it the other way around: I give you a fruit bearing mission in order that the Father might answer your prayers.
The point: prayer malfunctions when it is not used in fruit-bearing.
Prayer is for fruit-bearing.
Therefore Jesus said to His disciples and to us, since I want you to pray and to get answers to your prayers, I chose you and I appointed you to go and bear fruit.
If you are not devoted to fruit-bearing you have no warrant for expecting answers to prayer.
Prayer and fruit-bearing go hand-in-hand.
Secondly, as a result of prayer being for fruit-bearing, prayer is not for gratifying natural desires.
Now I know that Jesus taught us to pray, /"Give us this day, our daily bread."/
And what could be more natural than the desire to eat?
And I know that there are dozens of instances in the Bible of people praying for desires as natural as the desire for protection from enemies and escape from danger and success in vocation and fertility in marriage, recovery from sickness, etc.
My point is not that our natural desires are wrong.
My point is that they should always be subordinate to spiritual desires, kingdom desires, fruit-bearing desires, gospel-spreading, God-centered desires, Christ-exalting, God-glorifying desires should come first.
And when our natural desires are felt as a means to achieve these greater desires then they become the proper subject of prayer.
We pray for our needs in order for God to be glorified thru our lives.
Jesus said to pray, /"Give us this day our daily bread,"/ he also said, make it your heart's desire that God’s name would be hallowed – made holy in our lives and that His kingdom would come and that the will of God would be done on earth.
When your heart is caught up with those great desires, then having something to eat is not merely a natural desire, but a means to some great God-centered end.
And then it is the proper subject of prayer.
Prayer is for God's name and God's kingdom and God's will--it is for fruit-bearing in all those great things.
If our protection, and our escape from danger, and our eating and having clothes and houses and lands and education and vocational success leads to those great God-centered ends (the name of God and kingdom of God and will of God) then we pray about them with confidence.
This is what David meant when he said in Psalm 37:4, /"Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart."/
The desires of the heart cease to be merely natural desires when the heart delights above all else in the Lord.
Delighting in the Lord--in the hallowing of his name and the seeking of his kingdom and the doing of his will--transforms all natural desires into God-related desires.
They are transposed up into a higher key.
Prayer is not for gratifying natural desires.
It is for the glory of God.
Another way of saying it is this: if you want God to respond to your interests, you must be devoted to his interests.
God is God.
He does not run the world by hiring the consulting firm called Mankind.
He lets mankind share in the running of the world through prayer to the degree that we consult with him and get our goals and desires in tune with his purposes.
A good illustration of getting our goals in tune comes from  Alice in Wonderland where, at one point Alice says to the Cheshire Cat, "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where," said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
Are you doing that?
Is God number 1 in your life?
The evidence for your life lining up with God’s purpose is found in 1 John 5:14, /"This is the confidence which we have before him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, he hears us."/
Prayer is not for gratifying our natural desires.
It is for gratifying our desires when those desires have been so purified and so saturated with God that they coincide with his plans.
"If we ask anything according to his will."
John puts it another way in 1 John 3:22/, "Whatever we ask we receive from him because we keep his commandments and do the things that are pleasing in his sight."/
In other words prayer is not for gratifying natural desires.
Prayer is for satisfying the desires of people who are devoted to God's desires, people that do the things that are pleasing in God’s sight.
James put it yet another way in James 4:3, /"You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures."
/Prayer is not for gratifying natural desires.
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