Now if you would, take your Bibles in hand once again and turn this time to Matthew chapter 7, Matthew chapter 7, verses 7 through 11, which you can find on page 812 if you are using one of our church Bibles. We come today to the last of our summer series considering our Lord’s teaching on the subject of prayer. Excuse me. This is, in my judgment, the most encouraging and empowering passage on the subject of prayer, perhaps anywhere in holy Scripture. We are going to examine it together under four headings. First, we need to hear Jesus’ encouraging command; His encouraging command in verse 7. Then secondly, the escalating character of the prayer to which Jesus here is calling us in verses 7 and 8. And then thirdly, we mustn’t miss the emphatic promise that Jesus attaches to prayer in 7 and 8. And finally, is there anything more reassuring and motivating to believing prayer than the empowering picture that our Lord paints for us of our Father’s readiness to give good things to those who ask Him in verses 9 through 11. The encouraging command, the escalating character, the emphatic promise, and an empowering picture of true prayer.
Before we hear the Word of God and consider those four headings together, let’s pray and ask for the Lord’s blessing and help. Let us all pray.
Our Father, we cry out to You now that You would, by the power of the Holy Spirit, give us ears to hear, hearts that are receptive, pliable, responsive to our Savior’s instruction. O Lord, teach us to pray by Your Word and Spirit for Your honor and glory. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Matthew chapter 7 at the seventh verse. This is the Word of God:
“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. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 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!”
Amen, and we praise God that He has spoken in His holy, inerrant Word.
Think with me in the first place about the encouraging command of Christ with respect to prayer that we find in verse 7. Look at the text with me. Verse 7. Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.” The verbs there – ask, seek, knock – are all imperatives. That means they are not invitations. Jesus isn’t saying, “I would really like it if you would ask, seek and knock. Please, ask, seek and knock.” Neither are they a list of mere options from which we might choose. “No pressure, but should you so desire, you might consider asking, seeking and knocking.” No, these are commands. Ask. Seek. Knock. They have the force of law. This is your duty as a follower of Jesus Christ. You are required by your King and Savior to ask and seek and knock.
Too many of us use prayer the way we might use a fire extinguisher. It’s nice to have hanging on the wall, just in case, but it’s only ever used when the kitchen catches fire. But that’s not what prayer is to be like. Jesus says it’s not for occasional, emergency use. It is a mandatory, every day requirement of a faithful follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. “Well that sounds awfully heavy, pastor. The law, the force of law. I thought you said this was encouraging!” Well let me adapt an illustration I heard recently to try and show you how encouraging Christ’s command actually is. Suppose for a moment with me that the richest man imaginable – so a mega, multi-billionaire – one day, uncharacteristically and in a fit of sudden philanthropy, decides to make a gift of $10,000 to every person living in the United States. He takes out an advertisement in the newspaper, he posts it online, the TV broadcasts the news – “$10,000 available at such-and-such an address, Jackson, Mississippi, free to all.” And sure enough, people soon begin to turn up at the man’s door to claim their gift. But inevitably, some are suspicious and skeptical. “There must be strings attached,” they think, and so they stay away. Others have been so downtrodden, so abused by the misfortunes of life and the malice of a cruel world, that they just can’t believe that this is a real and sincere offer. “It’s just too good to be true, surely!” and so they don’t come. And still others think so very little of themselves that they feel certain that whatever the man might say in public, that when they actually show up at his door, he’ll take one look at their rags and send them packing without a penny, and so they don’t come.
Well it’s not long before the man realizes, “No one is taking my offer seriously.” He goes on TV himself – Fox News, CNN, MSNBC. He does the morning shows. He begs people, “Please come! I have $10,000 for you!” And still, the weeks go by, the months pass, and very few people take him up on his promised gift. Finally, the man decides he is going to run for president. He pours his resources into the campaign; he wins in a landslide. And his first act upon taking office is to sign into a law a bill commanding everyone to come to Washington, D.C., and everyone who comes will receive a check for $10,000. Now it’s law. You must come.
Whatever might be said about that law, the doubts of every skeptic about the man’s sincerity must crumble to the dust now, surely. No one can imagine now that they don’t qualify for the gift. The law says the meanest beggar sleeping under a bridge is commanded to come. Every person living under the purview of the law of the land has a legal right and duty to come and to receive the gift. And that is precisely what we have here in verse 7, isn’t it? Jesus says to everyone who has Him as Savior, who have His God and Father as their God and Father, “You are commanded to come.” But you look at your heart and you see the stains of your terrible compromises in the week behind us – the ugly things you’ve said to your spouse, the lies you told the office, your glaring failures of discipline with the children in your home. The truth is, you’ve been selfish and lazy and jealous and proud, and you’re ashamed. And you think deep down somewhere, “My prayers can’t possibly be welcome in the throneroom of heaven. Surely the Father would never want to answer my prayers.” And you don’t call upon Him as you should.
Or perhaps you tell yourself, “I’m not an intellectual. I must have misunderstood this passage because it just can’t be as generous and free as it appears. Surely.” And so you don’t come to Him with any kind of expectation that He would want to bless you. But the Word of God is saying to us, “No, you are under orders. You are required to come. However far you have fallen, however limited your understanding, however weak and trembling your faith in Christ, your King says, ‘Come. Ask. Seek. Knock. It is the law!’” If you are a Christian, you have all the warrant you need in the command of Jesus Christ to come and enjoy the welcome of heaven whenever you pray. And listen, if the sense of the guilt of your past sin keeps you from prayer, you need to understand that Jesus’ command here makes it sin to refuse to ask, seek and knock. You would be adding sin to sin to stay silent. The Father wants you to ask, do you see. He wants you to seek Him. He wants you knocking on His door, albeit with your sin–stained hands. You can never weary Him with your requests. This is a deeply encouraging command. The Lord Jesus knows some of us require His command to begin to hear Him really say, “I mean it. I really mean it. I want you to come. You are commanded to come. You, you are commanded to come. I want to hear from you.” That’s the first thing – the encouraging command.
The second thing is the escalating character of the prayer that Jesus is calling for. Look again at the text. Some commentators think that all Jesus intends by “Ask, seek, knock” is, “Pray, pray and pray.” He’s just using synonyms for variety and interest to make the prose memorable. And I suppose there is some truth in that and we shouldn’t press it too far, but I cannot help but seeing an escalating intensity in these three expressions. They’re not merely synonyms, after all. There is a progression here. First, “Ask.” That’s the starting point. It is the simple, basic clarity of Christian duty toward God. Ask Him. Just ask Him. That’s the starting point. The essence of prayer, really – we sometimes complicate prayer, don’t we? Imagining it must be erudite and dripping with Scriptural allusions and filled with theological profundity. Well let other people work to display what they know, but do not be deceived for a moment into thinking that they are really praying when they do that. “Prayer,” says the shorter catechism, “is an offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to His will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgment of His mercies.” That’s a marvelous definition of prayer. At its basic, it is an offering up of our desires unto God. It’s just asking. It’s asking. You can do that. Ask Him. “Ask Me,” He says. The King is inviting you to ask Him.
And then there’s seeking. There is an escalation here. “Sweetheart, where are the car keys?” That’s how it starts. It’s a mere ask. Usually that’s enough. “They’re over there on the table.” “Okay, got them. Thank you.” But what happens when the reply is instead, “Well, darling, you had them last. I don’t know where the car keys are.” Now you’re digging in coat pockets and rooting in handbags and pulling up sofa cushions. You have to have those car keys, but if you want them, you’re going to have to seek them. You’re going to have to hunt for them. Sometimes a one-off ask isn’t enough. God wants us to trust Him and to go to Him and press Him and pursue Him and seek Him until we find Him.
But then haven’t you found that there are times when it seems like, as much as we ask and as much as we seek the Lord there is a door locked up tight between us and the help we are looking for? We look at the situation and there are, what appear to me, insurmountable obstacles. There are hindrances to success and the solutions just elude us. Do you know the name Brother Andrew? Do you know that name? He used to smuggle Bibles behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. And the mission organization he went on to found is named Open Doors. It continues today to advocate for the persecuted church in countries that are hostile to the Gospel. It’s a fantastic name, isn’t it? Open Doors. The kingdom of Jesus Christ is no respecter of geographical borders. There is no such thing as a closed country under the Lordship of King Jesus. God opens closed doors. And so you come to a closed door and you can’t see how God could possibly get it done. He wants you to knock until the door opens.
Or think about Sam Patterson’s words to Erskine Wells in 1962 when Mr. Wells doubted there was any way they could form Reformed Theological Seminary. And you remember what Patterson asked him? “How big is your God?” That’s really what Jesus is asking us here too. You’ve asked and the answer has not come immediately. You’ve been seeking, and still nothing. The door seems closed, and yet the need remains, the situation lingers, the burden persists, and so knock, Jesus says. How big is your God? Do you think this closed door is any real obstacle to Him? I believe that there are times when the Lord sets a closed door before us not to signal to us that this is the wrong direction and we should look elsewhere, but to call us to greater heights of faith and persistence as we ask Him to do all His holy will, to pull perseverance from our believing hearts. Perhaps the reason we do not see more answered prayer is because we give up too readily when we come to closed doors. Ask and seek and knock.
The encouraging command. The escalating character. And then thirdly, there is an emphatic promise right here, isn’t there? Jesus doesn’t simply say, “I command you to ask and to seek and to knock.” He adds a wonderful promise – “Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.” And then He doubles the promise just for emphasis and good measure, in case you were wondering that He didn’t really mean it. Verse 8, “For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, it will be opened.” There is no ambiguity here. Jesus isn’t edging. He wants you to feel the insistence behind the promise that God your Father will answer the cries of His children.
And don’t miss the word, the extravagant, almost breath-taking word with which verse 8 begins. What is the scope of Jesus’ promise? To whom does it apply? Verse 8, “For everyone who asks receives.” Isn’t that stunning? This is a promise made out not to a special few, not to the clever or qualified or the elite only, but to every child of God. Every child of God. “Now, wait a minute,” you say. “This is a certain and emphatic promise extended to every Christian. I can see that plainly in the text. But pastor, does that mean that God is now bound to give me whatever I want, whenever I want it? Is this a blank check for me to name and claim health and wealth and prosperity should I so desire it? Is that what this means? That I can blab and grab whatever I want and God has bound Himself to give it to me because it says right here, ‘Ask and it will be given. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened.’ Is that what this means? Is it an absolute, an unqualified guarantee that any time a Christian opens his mouth and asks for something from God, God must deliver?”
Well clearly not. Just like any Biblical text, we must interpret these verses in light of the total teaching of holy Scripture on the subject of prayer. And when you do that, you will see there are a number of important qualifications to this promise that we have to keep in mind if we are to understand it correctly. I think it will be helpful to take a few moments to think through some of those vital qualifications to the promise. Let me suggest a few of them.
First of all, sometimes God will say “No” to the cries of those who seek Him because we are not yet truly His children. The “everyone” of verse 8 to whom this promise is made, has to be read in the context of verse 11. These promises are extended to those who call God “Father.” You become a child of God not simply by natural birth, remember. You become a child of God by the new birth alone. Jesus said, “You must be born again.” If you wish the courts of heaven to hear your cries and the One who reigns over all things to give you your heart’s desire, you must come to Him not as a rebel living according to the dictates and pleasures of your own lusts, but as a heart-broken, repentant, child of God whose heart is made new by the grace of Jesus Christ, clinging to your Savior, the Lord Jesus, alone for mercy. You must be born again. You must have God as your Father.
And so there is a way for you to pray. Here’s the first prayer you can pray and be sure the promise of verses 7 and 8 will apply to you. Pray like this, “O God, take away my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh. I am dead in my sin. Make me alive together with Christ. I take Your Son for my only Savior, and His cross for my only hope. He has paid for sinners, and I trust Him to satisfy Your every requirement on my behalf. I confess my sin before You – my guilt, my helplessness. Forgive me and make me Your child by the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. Dear Lord, give me a near heart.” Have you prayed like that? Prayed for a new heart? That God, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ might become your Father. It is the first and necessary requirement to know when you call to Him, He hears and is ready to answer. Sometimes God will refuse to answer our prayers because the fact is, we are not yet His children.
Secondly, sometimes God will refuse to answer our prayers because though we are His children, what we want isn’t good. The end of verse 11 makes that clear here in our text, doesn’t it? What does the Father give His children when they ask and seek and knock? Does He just indulge them and always give them whatever they want without a second thought? No, look at the character of the Father’s gift. Verse 11, “Your Father who is in heaven gives good things to those who ask Him.” Have you ever stopped to consider how profoundly thankful we ought all to be that God has said, “No way” to so many of our innocent, well intentioned prayers over the years? Think about it. What a mess our lives would be in if we had taken a different path, accepted that new position, made that new move. Isn’t that so? God knew what we didn’t know, and in His Fatherly love for us, He didn’t give us what we asked for. He gave us what was better. He gave us what was good. So sometimes the problem is that we are not children of God. Sometimes the problem is that we do not know what is in our best interest, and God always gives us what is good and not always what we ask for.
But then thirdly, there are other times when the problem isn’t the thing we are asking for but the motives behind the otherwise perfectly appropriate request. Listen to James 4, verses 2 and 3. “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.” And isn’t that often our problem? It’s not that the thing itself for which we are praying is wrong; it’s that the want the good thing for wicked reasons. “O God, bless my preaching. Make it mighty. Challenge and change lives.” That’s a good prayer for me to pray. But what if my deep motive is that you would come and say to me at the door, “Oh boy, that was a great sermon!” and I get to bask a little bit in my own excellence? It’s a good thing to pray for, but with wicked motives. And how often our fickle hearts pray for the things that we know we are supposed to want but we want them for all the wrong reasons.
And sometimes God will not answer because even though we are His children and we are asking for the right things and our motives in the request are good, nevertheless we are not seriously addressing besetting sin in our own hearts. Listen to the challenging words of Psalm 66 verse 18. “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” You are leading a small group Bible study and you pray diligently that the Lord will bless your efforts. And that’s all very good, but you have a filthy mouth when you are with your friends or you are a terrible gossip and you can’t wait to share what you know. Or you are a secret drunk or you are an uncontrolled glutton. You harbor grudges in your heart. And these are acceptable sins in our culture, aren’t they? Nobody challenges you on them. Never. No one names them and no one ever confronts you. And so you read the Scriptures, you hear the sermons, and the Lord names your sin and you think it all applies to someone else. You have forgotten the solemn words of the living God to the people of Judah in Isaiah 59:2, “Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.”
Are you cherishing secret sin in your heart? No wonder the Lord hasn’t listened to your prayers. Sometimes He withholds His blessing in answer to your cries in His great mercy as your loving heavenly Father because He wants you to wake up and turn back. You need to repent. Humble yourself. Before you cry for blessing and favor, cry for pardon and forgiveness. Shine some light on your ungodly habits and get the help of Christian friends. Take concrete steps to change. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. Listen, if God were to give you the good, worthy blessings you have been asking for without you engaging in repentance and mortifying your sin, you might very well continue in that sin all the while thinking that God cares even less about your lust and your pride and your vanity than everybody else seems too. “After all, He’s blessing me and He’s answering my prayers.” No, there are times when precisely because He loves you so much and He wants you to turn back that He will say “No” to you in the hopes that denying you His favors and blessings might alarm you and wake you up and bring you to repentance.
Sometimes God will not answer because we are not yet actually His children. Sometimes it’s because we are asking for the wrong thing. Sometimes we are asking for the right things with the wrong motives. Sometimes we are asking for the right things with the right motives as His beloved children, but we are harboring, cherishing, playing, cultivating secret sin in other areas of our lives. And finally, sometimes God will not answer because instead of delivering us from a season of testing and refining, He wants to lead us through a season of testing and refining that we might learn to trust Him more and more and cling to Him in the midst of all of our trials with all the strength we can muster, with new tenacity, finding His grace to be sufficient for us.
Think about the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12. He was suffering some unknown affliction, and three times he asked the Lord to take this thorn in his flesh away. “But,” writes Paul, “He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” It is not that Paul’s prayer was wrong or that he had asked selfishly, or that he was cherishing sin in his heart. It’s simply that God intended to train Paul and mature Paul and grow Paul and show Paul how and through Paul show many others how, amidst all the frailties and pains of his suffering, the grace of God would keep him and sustain him and make him useful, weak as he was, that all the glory and praise might belong to Jesus Christ. God was wielding the scalpel of hard providence to wound and to heal in the apostle’s life. And I know that many of you are not strangers – you bear the scars of God’s surgery, His heart surgery in your own life also. And you know that it is painful, but you also know that it has been sanctifying, humbling, correcting, and strengthening the muscle of faith as you have been led to cling more tightly than ever to the all sufficient grace of Jesus Christ.
So this is not a blank check, a bare guarantee that whatever you want you can have. And yet, even with those qualifications, this is a precious promise. Isn’t it? It is made, we might say, to right askers asking rightly. This promise, it’s made out to right askers asking rightly. That is to say, true Christians turning from sin, trusting in Christ, accepting that God knows best, meekly seeking His glory, not our own, and wedding our desires to God’s own promises. Right askers asking rightly. To people who pray like that, the Word of God affixes an emphatic promise. “Ask, and you will receive. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened.” Search your heart, so far as it depends on you, make certain that you are a right asker asking rightly.
The encouraging command. The escalating character. The emphatic promise. Finally and briefly, verses 9 through 11, the empowering picture that Jesus gives us. You see the word picture that He paints. Earthly dads, sinners though they be, when their children ask for bread, do not give them rocks. Or if they want a fish, they don’t give them a serpent. That’s just cruel. And no earthly father would do that. Well then, Jesus says to us, think of your Father who is in heaven. He is not like an earthly father. So many of us struggle with this, don’t we, because our earthly fathers failed us in countless ways and we project the flaws of our earthly father onto our Father who is in heaven. But Jesus is saying there is a great contrast even between the very best of earthly fathers and the infinite perfections of your Father who is in heaven. There is no imperfection in His care, no mistake in His plan, no flaw in His character, no blind spots in His mercy. There is no coldness, no harshness, no caprese, no spite in Him.
God is love and He loves you, His children, with an everlasting love. In love, He predestined us to be conformed to the image of His Son. He has always loved you, believer in Jesus Christ, and nothing, “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate you from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.” His heart, if I can put it this way, His heart beats with perfect, flawless, limitless compassion for His children. Why wouldn’t you come running to Him when this is who He is? Not cold and distant and harsh and reluctant, but ready, eager to lavish upon you the gifts of His love. Do you know that a failure to pray in the life of a Christian is a repudiation of the love of God? Ask, seek, knock. Everyone who asks receives. The one who seeks finds. To the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Your Father knows to give good things to those who ask Him. Ask Him! Ask Him! Don’t you believe that He loves you? A failure to pray is a denial of the love of God. He loves you. Ask Him! Leave the nature of the gift to Him, to order and shape however He wills. He knows best. But ask Him. “You have not,” James says, “because you ask not.” So would you go home this afternoon and make a fresh beginning and ask the Lord to make you into a man or woman of prayer. Make a plan. Keep it modest and reasonable. Structure a new routine for persistent, daily prayer.
This Tuesday in Patterson Hall at 12 o’clock our congregational prayer meeting resumes. It lasts forty-five minutes. It is designed for you to come as you can and leave when you must. Why not come and join us and make a purpose this semester to participate in congregational prayer, that we might be a church, a praying people. We’ve been making the disciples’ request from Luke 11 this summer our own – “Lord, teach us to pray.” And He’s been teaching us, hasn’t He? The question is, “Will your personal prayer life, will our congregational prayer life, bear the fruit of His instruction to the glory of God and the lasting good of our souls?” May the Lord make us indeed a praying people. Let’s pray together.Our God and Father, we confess the countless ways in which we neglect, misuse, misunderstand, distort the great gift of prayer. We bow before You and we ask for Your mercy and pardon and we pray that by the power of Your Holy Spirit, as You work by Your Word in our hearts and consciences, that You would begin to awaken in us new confidence, that when we, Your children, clinging to Jesus, cry to You for help, You hear and You will answer. O God, make us a praying church for the glory and praise of the name of Christ, for whose sake we ask it all. Amen.