Ask Your Father in Heaven
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2012 · 11 March 2012
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! 12 So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
Just consider for a moment some of the attributes of God such as that God is infinitely strong and can do all that He pleases, and that He is infinitely righteous so that he only does what is right, and that He is infinitely good so that everything He does is perfectly good, and that He is infinitely wise so that he always knows perfectly what is right and good.
And then that on top of all that He is also infinitely loving so that in all his strength and righteousness and goodness and wisdom He also cares deeply for His loved ones—when you pause to consider this, then the invitation of this God to ask Him for good things, with the promise that He will give them, is incredibly wonderful.
And this means that one of the great tragedies of the church now is how little we actually do pray. God gives us the greatest invitation in the world, and incomprehensibly we regularly turn away to do other unimportant things.
It’s as though God sent us an invitation to the greatest banquet that ever was and we sent a reply back that says, “I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it,” or, “I have bought five oxen, and I must go to examine them,” or, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come” (Luke 14:18-20).
Well, that was then. My prayer now is that God would use this message and this word from Jesus in Matthew 7, and other influences in your life, to bring back to life a new compelling inclination to pray in 2012. I hope that each of you will ask God to do that as we look at this text.
We will do it in two steps. First, we will look at eight encouragements to pray in Matthew 7:7-11. Second, we will try to answer the question of how we are to better understand these promises that we will receive when we ask, and find when we seek, and have the door opened when we knock.
Six of these encouragements are explicit in this text and two are implicit. It seems clear to me that one of the purposes of Jesus in these verses is to encourage us and motivate us to pray. He wants us to pray. How does he encourage us?
1. He Invites Us to Pray. Three times he commands us to pray—to ask him for what we need. It’s the number of times that he invites us in different ways that gets our attention. Verses 7-8: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.”
The repetition means, “I want you to do this. Ask your Father for what you need. Seek your Father for the help you need. Knock on the door of your Father’s house so he will open and give you what you need. Ask, seek and knock. I invite you three times because I really want you to receive your Father’s help.”
2. He Makes Promises to Us if We Pray. Even better and more amazing than the three invitations are the seven promises. Verses 7-8: “Ask, and [#1] it will be given to you; seek, and [#2] you will find; knock, and [#3] it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks [#4] receives, and the one who seeks [#5] finds, and to the one who knocks [#6] it will be opened.” Then at the end of verse 11b (#7): “How much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
Seven promises. It will be given you. You will find. It will be opened to you. The asker receives. The seeker finds. The knocker gets an open door. Your Father will give you good things. The point of this array of promises is: Be encouraged to come. Pray to him. It is not in vain that you pray. He answers. He gives good things when you pray. Pray often, pray regularly, pray confidently in 2012.
3. God Makes Himself Available at Different Levels. Jesus encourages us not only by the number of invitations and promises, but by the threefold variety of invitations. In other words, God stands ready to respond positively when you find him at different levels of accessibility. Ask. Seek. Knock.
If the father is close, the child directly asks Him for what he needs. If the father is far away, the child seeks his father for what he needs. If the child finds the father behind a closed door, he knocks to get what he needs. It doesn’t matter whether you find God close at hand or far away and even with barriers between, He still will hear and He will give good things to you because you looked to Him and not to someone or something else.
4. Everyone Who Asks Receives. Jesus encourages us to pray by telling us that everyone who asks receives, not just some. Verse 8, “For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” The word everyone in verse 8, says that we should not be timid and hesitant, that somehow it will work for others but not for us.
Of course, He is talking about the children of God here, not all human beings everywhere. If you do not have Jesus as our Savior and God as our Father, then these promises don’t apply to you. And many who call themselves Christians have not received Him yet.
John 1:12 says, “To all who did receive Him [Jesus], who believed in his name, He gave the right to become children of God.” To become the child of God, we must receive the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who gives us the authority of adoption. That is who these promises are for.
For those who receive Jesus, every one of them who asks receives good things from his Father. The point is that none of his children is excluded. All are welcome and urged to come. Martin Luther saw the way Jesus is motivating here like this:
“He knows that we are timid and shy, that we feel unworthy and unfit to present our needs to God. . . . We think that God is so great and we are so tiny that we do not dare to pray. . . . That is why Christ wants to change such timid thoughts, to remove our doubts, and to have us go ahead confidently and boldly.” Vol. 21 of Luther’s Works (Concordia, 1956, p.234.)
5. We Are Coming to Our Father. Verse 11, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” It is one of the greatest of all truths. God is our Father. The implication is that He will never, ever give us what is bad for us. Never, because He is our Father.
6. Our Heavenly Father Is Better than Our Earthly Father. Jesus encourages us to pray by showing us that our heavenly Father is better than our earthly father and will far more certainly give good things to us than they did. There is no evil in our heavenly Father like there is in our earthly father.
Verse 11 again, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” Jesus was aware, that our earthly fathers are sinful. This is why the Bible repeatedly draws attention not only to the similarity between earthly fathers and the heavenly Father, but also to the differences (e.g. Hebrews 12:9-11; Matthew 5:48).
So Jesus goes beyond merely saying that God is your Father; He says that God is always better than your earthly father, because all earthly fathers are evil and God is not. This is a clear example of Jesus teaching us the universal sinfulness of human beings. He states that his disciples also are evil—he doesn’t choose a softer word like sinful, or weak. He simply says that his disciples are evil.
The problem is that when you are unregenerate you do not consider yourself evil. This is what someone wrote after hearing Billy Graham, “I have never felt that I was lost, nor do I feel that I daily wallow in the mire of sin although repetitive preaching insists that I do. Give me a practical religion that teaches gentleness and tolerance, that acknowledges no barriers of color or creed. That remembers the aged and teaches children of goodness and not sin. If in order to save my soul I must accept such a philosophy as I have recently heard preached I prefer to remain forever damned." He made his choice, what’s yours?
Let’s go back to God, our Father. Don’t ever limit your understanding of the Fatherhood of God to your experience of your own father. Rather, take heart in that God has none of the sins or limitations or weaknesses or hang-ups of your earthly father. In Him there is no evil.
And the point Jesus makes is: Even fallen, sinful fathers have enough common grace to give good things to their children. There are terribly abusive fathers. But in most places in the world, fathers are doing good for their children, even when they are unclear about what is good for them. But God is always better. Therefore, if your earthly father gave you good things, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things if you ask?
And there is something implicit here that underlines encouragement #4 above—the word everyone—“Everyone who asks receives.” If Jesus says to his disciples, “You are children of God. And you are evil. In other words, even after you are adopted by God into his family, sin remains in you. But Jesus says, everyone will receive, every one of God’s evil children! We will see why in a moment.
7. We Can Trust God’s Goodness Because He Has Already Made Us His Children. This is from St. Augustine: “For what would He not now give to sons when they ask, when He has already granted this very thing, namely, that they might be sons?” We know that being a son of God is a gift we receive when we come to Jesus (John 1:12).
Jesus said to the Pharisees in John 8:42, “If God were your Father, you would love me.” But God is not their Father. They reject Jesus. So, not all people are the sons of God. But if God has freely made us sons, how much more will he give us what we need, right?
8. The Cross Is the Foundation of Prayer. Because He calls us evil and yet He says we are children of God. How can it be that evil people are adopted by an all holy God? How can we presume to be His children, let alone ask and expect to receive, and seek and expect to find, and knock and expect to have the door opened?
Jesus gave the answer several times. In Matthew 20:28, he said, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” He gave his life to ransom us from the wrath of God and put us in the position of children who only receive good things.
And in Matthew 26:28, He said at the Last Supper, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Because of Christ’s blood, our sins are forgiven when we trust in Him. This is why even though Jesus calls us evil, we can be the children of God and count on Him to give us good things when we ask him.
The death of Jesus is the foundation for all the promises of God and all the answers to prayer that we ever get. This is why we say “in Jesus’ name” at the end of our prayers. Everything depends on Him.
The summary is that Jesus really encourages us to pray. Why else talk like this about prayer if his goal for us in 2012 is not that we pray. So he gives us encouragement upon encouragement, at least eight of them.
One final question: How shall we understand these six promises in verses 7 and 8: “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”? Does this mean that everything a child of God asks for he gets?
No, we do not get everything we ask for and we should not and we would not want to. Because we would in effect become God if God did everything we asked. We would not want to get everything we asked is because we would then have to bear the burden of infinite wisdom which we do not have.
But the reason we do not get all we ask is because the text teaches this. Jesus says in verses 9-10 that a good father will not give his child a stone if he asks for bread, and will not give him a serpent if he asks for a fish. What if the child asks for a serpent? What if we ask for something that we should not have and is not good for us?
In verse 11, Jesus gives us this truth from the illustrations: Our Father Gives Only Good Things. He does not give serpents to children. Therefore, the text itself does not say that “Ask and you will receive” means “Ask and you will receive the very thing you ask for when you ask for it in the way you ask for it.” It doesn’t say that and it doesn’t mean that.
It says that when we ask and seek and knock—He will hear and He will give us good things. And only He knows what really is best for us, right? Sometimes it is just what we asked. Sometimes it is just when we ask it. Sometimes just the way we desire. And other times He gives us something better, or at a time He knows is better, or in a way He knows is better.
And of course, this tests our faith. Because if we thought that something different were better, we would have asked for it in the first place. But we are not God. We are not infinitely strong, or infinitely righteous, or infinitely good, or infinitely wise, or infinitely loving. And therefore, it is a great mercy to us and to the world that we do not get all we ask.
But if we take Jesus at his word, O how much blessing we forfeit because we do not ask and seek and knock—blessings for ourselves, our families, our church, our nation, our world. So would you join me in a fresh new commitment to set aside time for prayer alone and in families and in church in 2012, Amen?