2. Ask and it shall be given you…
It was maybe 14-15 years after hearing Pastor Price say that God always answered his prayers, that I was meditating on this scripture:
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 (Matthew 7:7-8 KJV)
I was repeating it out loud to myself, reading it, thinking about it, saying it, chewing on it you could say, over a period of days and weeks. At one point I began to focus on the first part of each verse, so that I was just repeating to myself:
Ask, and it shall be given you… For every one that asketh receiveth…
When you ask it will be given to you.
“Ask and it will be given to you…” Not might be given to you, but will be given to you. It’s a certainty, a sure thing. The words, ask, seek and knock are parallels, synonyms sort of, repetitions of the same idea. How much more certain could Jesus make it? What language could he have used to make it more certain than, “will be given to you?” When you ask, it will be given to you.
And he means EVERYONE.
Jesus follows up in the next verse, “For everyone who asks receives…” He doesn’t say every nice person, or every religious person, or even every person who serves God. No, “…everyone who asks receives.”
It doesn’t work the way we expect it to. We’d rather it said, every good person who ask receives, or maybe every holy person, or religious person, or regular church attender, or Bible reader, or something like that. But, in the Bible, and in real life, often the people we think of as least qualified to get their prayers answered, are the ones who get their prayers answered.
They didn’t qualify.
When Jesus was preaching in his hometown of Nazareth, in Luke 4, he rebuked the people for their lack of faith because they failed to receive him, accept him, believe that he’d be able to do the miracles, healings, he’d been doing everywhere else. He rebuked them by reminding them that their ancestors, had rejected the miracle ministries of Elijah and Elisha, who now, in Jesus day, were considered the greatest of the prophets.
I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. (Luke 4:25-26 NIV)
The widow Elijah was sent to, the widow miraculously rescued from the severe famine by Elijah while all the religiously observant widows in Israel were starving, was one of those everyones Jesus was talking about.
We’d call her an idol worshipper, or a pagan, she definitely wasn’t what we’d call a church goer. Think how shocking that was to the people hearing Jesus. They were God’s people, they had a covenant with God, and God has passed over them to rescue a woman who wasn’t an Israeli, who no doubt worshipped idols in the most horrible ways. God had sent Elijah, the greatest of the prophets, to rescue her, passing over all the people who were starving in Israel. To put it in cultural terms we can understand, it’s as though Jesus had gone to your church one Sunday and said, there were many Christian widows during the time of the great famine, but the only widow who received miraculous deliverance from the man of God, was an old prostitute, who was an atheist. You can kind of see why the people of Nazareth might want to throw Jesus off a cliff.
Jesus continues his rebuke with the example of Elisha,
27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.” (Luke 4:27 NIV)
So all the lepers in Israel went without their healing, while this idol worshipping leper, the head of the Syrian army which had conquered Israel, was healed. Naaman was one of those everyones.
The qualified did without.
You see this same thing in the ministry of Jesus. Once, a centurion came to Jesus asking for healing for his servant. Jesus said he would come and heal him,
8 The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9 For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
10 When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. (Matthew 8:8-10 NIV)
We tend to focus on the great faith of the Centurion, but Jesus’s real point is the lack of faith in Israel. Here’s this foreigner, a member of the Roman army that’s occupying our country, probably an idol worshipper, and he believes that I have authority to speak a word and cause his servant to be healed, where is your faith Israel, where’s your faith, people of the covenant? The Centurion was an everyone.
He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.
You can see this idea of God’s desire to bless everyone in a couple other of Jesus’s sayings:
45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:45 NIV)
35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. (Luke 6:35 NIV)
God answered the prayers of the evilest man in the Bible.
My favorite example, of God answering the prayers of everyone, is the story of King Manasseh, who I like to call, the evilest man in the Bible.
“2 Chronicles 33:1-13 (NIV) Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem fifty- five years. 2 He did evil in the eyes of the Lord… 3 … he also erected altars to the Baals and made Asherah poles. He bowed down to all the starry hosts and worshiped them. 4 He built altars in the temple of the Lord, … 6 He sacrificed his children in the fire in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, practiced divination and witchcraft, sought omens, and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger…9 But Manasseh led Judah and the people of Jerusalem astray, so that they did more evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before the Israelites. 10 The Lord spoke to Manasseh and his people, but they paid no attention. 11 So the Lord brought against them the army commanders of the king of Assyria, who took Manasseh prisoner, put a hook in his nose, bound him with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon. 12 In his distress he sought the favor of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors. 13 And when he prayed to him, the Lord was moved by his entreaty and listened to his plea; so he brought him back to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord is God.”
The angels shut Manasseh’s prayers out of heaven.
King Manasseh repented, he turned back to following God, and God answered his prayer. I love the details the Rabbi’s add to the story of Manasseh. Here’s Joseph Frankovich, from the Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research, relating the story of Manasseh as set out in the Jerusalem Talmud.
“The rabbinic retelling of the story relates how Manasseh, while incarcerated, prayed to all of his idols for deliverance, but to no avail. One day, however, he remembered a passage of Scripture that he had heard his father read in the synagogue. That passage came from Deuteronomy 4:25-31…
…Remembering these verses which he had heard in his youth, Manasseh reasoned that he might as well try calling out to God. If his fortune did not change after praying to God, Manasseh could assume safely that there is no difference between God and an idol. If, however, God answered his prayer, then he would repent and quit his idolatrous ways. So, Manasseh prayed, and as his prayer was ascending on high, the angels of the heavenly court quickly got to the windows and closed the shutters…
One can imagine the angels walking around the heavenly palace and trying to act as if they were not up to something. But God discerned that something was afoot, and he realized that Manasseh was supplicating him in prayer. Discovering that Manasseh’s prayers were rising up to heaven, but bouncing off the shutters, God became very restless. As each prayer hit the bolted shutters, God became more agitated. Finally, out of desperation, he ripped a hole through the throne of glory, and poof! Up the prayers came through the hole that he had dug through his throne. Greatly relieved, God happily accepted Manasseh’s prayers, and as a result of Manasseh’s turning toward him, God returned him to Jerusalem and restored his royal throne…”
I love the idea of the angels shutting up the windows so that Manasseh’s prayer couldn’t reach God, because that’s what we’d’ve wanted to do too, but God’s attitude towards prayer is so different. God has a compulsion, a want to, a desire, to answer our prayers, a desire so strong that He tore up the floor of heaven so that the prayer of the evilist man in the Bible could get to him.
When Jesus says, “everyone who asks receives,” he means everyone. I like that because it means I qualify, because I’m an everyone. If God will answer Manasseh’s prayers, if God will answer the prayers of the evilest man in the Bible, then he’ll certainly answer my prayers, and he’ll certainly answer your prayers, it’s a sure thing. Everyone who asks receives.
Written above the doorway to the throne of God…
Here’s how I like to think about it. I imagine going before God to make a request, to submit my prayer. I'm waiting for my turn in an antechamber outside God’s throne room, there’s a tall, wide, doorway open to God’s throne room. As I look through the doorway I see God's throne a ways off. Then I see, carved into the stone above the doorway, these words,
“Ask and it shall be given you… for everyone that asketh receiveth.”
Well that gives you an entirely different attitude as you approach the throne of God.
That scenario isn’t too hard for me to imagine because the Marquez family operates under a similar principle. We have a rule that we say, “Yes,” to any kid, teenager, whatever, who comes to our door with a school fundraiser. Sometimes I have to search for quarters so I can buy the candy bar, but we always say “Yes.” Everyone who asks receives. Anyone who knows us could tell their fundraising friends, “Go to pastor Greg’s house, he always says yes, everyone who asks receives.” That’s what Jesus is telling us about God. That’s what Jesus is telling us it’s like when we come to God’s house, asking, seeking and knocking.