David Jeremiah - The Great Adventure of Prayer
«Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you». These three instructions, ask, seek, and knock, are in the imperative mood. Now, I’m an old English major, so that means something to me, but let me tell you what it means if it doesn’t mean anything to you. The imperative mood is not a suggestion; it’s a command. They are not Jesus asking us to consider asking to pray about seeking and to think about knocking. Do you see the emphasis? You can’t escape it. The word «ask» is dominant in the text because God wants us to ask. He doesn’t tell us to beg. He doesn’t command us to cry out, though these may be valid expressions of prayer at any given time. But he gives us a clear, simple directive: ask.
I think one of the reasons why we may not pray as much as we ought to is we’ve made prayer a hard thing. Prayer is like a child going to his father to ask for what he needs. Oh, it’s much more than that, but it’s simply that. That’s persistence. Kids never quit. They just keep asking, and that’s exactly the kind of simplicity and determination that Jesus is talking about in his lesson to us. So then he says, after you ask, seek. Jesus says seek, and I mentioned that each of these commands grows in intensity. Seeking, to me, requires more effort than asking. It’s as if you first come to ask, but after asking, you realize you need to seek out the one who holds the answer.
So seeking is more about pursuing the giver than the gift, and it says, I will seek out the one who has the answer. I will find him. I will get to him. Sometimes in prayer, we casually ask, only to realize that we’ve allowed distance to come between us and the Lord. Seeking means to close that gap. It means drawing near to him so we can truly communicate in our prayers. We’re to ask, we’re to seek, and then the Bible says we’re to knock. It’s even more intimate and more intense than seeking. If you go to the place where you believe the answer is and you ask, then you seek the one who has the answer, finally, you find yourself at the door knocking and calling out, «Where is he? How can I receive the answer»?
However you interpret those three words, ask, seek, and knock, understand this, friends. Jesus is inviting us, each of us, to come. He wants us to come with intensity, bringing the needs that we have in our lives before him. We don’t have to knock down the door. He’s opened the door, and he invites us to ask. Let me say it this way. God is more anxious to hear your prayer than you are to hear his answer. And so when we don’t pray, we leave this tremendous opportunity on the table. The imperatives of prayer: ask, seek, and knock.
Now let me talk with you for a few moments about the influence of prayer. In verse 8, Jesus said, «For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened». This verse contains two key truths. First, it tells us that prayer is comprehensive. Notice the word «everyone,» a great word. Not just pastors, not just deacons, not just television preachers, not just those who have been to seminary or taken courses on prayer, Jesus is speaking to everyone. That means everyone in this room and everyone watching this message wherever you may be, you are included in this promise. Every kingdom child. That means you can pray like this. You can ask and seek and knock, and you can know that God will hear you.
This promise is for every single one of us. Some might say, «Well, I don’t pray much. I just send my requests to the church, and I let them pray». I know that’s true for a lot of people because I’m at the other end of that. What a tragedy. I’ve had so many people come to me over the years and they would tell me about a problem and they would say, «Pastor, this is going on in my life; would you pray for me»? And later in my ministry, I started to say to them, «Have you prayed about this»? «Well, no, that’s why I’m bringing it to you. I’m asking you to pray about it». And then I would say to them, you know, «I am happy to do that, but let me remind you, sir, missus, my prayer has no more efficacy before God than yours. I don’t stand ahead of you in the prayer line. Just because I’m a pastor doesn’t mean that my prayers are answered more than yours. So I’m happy to pray for you, but you don’t need to go through me».
You know, there is a branch of religion that teaches that but that’s not what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches we’re to go to God, that he opens his heart to us, and no matter who we are or how insignificant we may think we are in the kingdom, God wants us to talk with him. And if you’re thinking, «Surely God doesn’t mean me,» I’m going to say to you, «Oh, yes, he does. What part of everyone don’t you get»? Prayer’s comprehensive. And then the Bible teaches that prayer is certain. I’m not going to water this down or explain it away because this is exactly what God has said.
We always try to explain it away because of lack of our faith. He says: «Everyone who asks receives. Everyone who seeks finds. Everyone who knocks, it will be opened». Not some of the time, not most of the time, not a few of the people, not just some of the people, everyone who asks receives. One reason we don’t pray is because we don’t believe. And if we don’t believe, we have a real problem with the integrity of God’s Word.
You see, I believe God is waiting to open his treasures and provide what we need. He already has it. He doesn’t have to go and get it. He is simply waiting for us to ask. There’s an old story about a man who went to heaven. And when he got to heaven, he was ushered by St. Peter into the lobby of heaven. And quite surprised because the lobby was just surrounded with filing cabinets. He thought that wasn’t what heaven was gonna be like, and so he asked Saint Peter what that was. He said, «These cabinets are full of files of all the things God wanted to give to his children, but they never asked for them». And I remember when I heard that story, I actually prayed, «Lord, when I get to heaven, I want an empty file. I don’t want to have anything up there that I didn’t ask for,» yeah.
I remember Mark Batterson, who is one of my favorite current preachers, said, «I can guarantee you that 100% of the prayers you don’t pray will not be answered». And he’s absolutely right. I wrote this simple prayer in my journal one day. Here’s just a little verse: «I believe God answers prayer, answers always everywhere. I may cast my anxious care, burdens that I never bear, on the God who answers prayer». God answers prayer. Everyone who prays receives. Then, along with the imperatives of prayer and the influence of prayer, we have Jesus’s illustration of prayer.
If you want to learn how to preach, you need to read Jesus’s sermons. He was a great preacher. And I take great counsel in the fact that Jesus was a storyteller. He was a great storyteller. And he didn’t have illustration books like we have or novels or whatever we read. Didn’t have a newspaper with current stories in it. But Jesus often took illustrations from the things he saw. He’d be walking along, he had a fig tree one day, and he gave an illustration.
Notice in verses 9 and 10, Jesus illustrating these principles. «What man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent»? Jesus wants to make prayer very practical, not philosophical, not overly spiritual. Do you remember when Jesus was in the wilderness being tempted by Satan? Satan said to him, «Why don’t you turn this stone into a loaf of bread»? What’s often lost in that story is that the stones in the region looked like small loaves of bread. I have no doubt that Satan pointed to a stone that resembled a loaf and said, «Why don’t you turn that into bread»?
Now Jesus is using the same analogy. He says, «Which of you as a father, if your son comes to you and says, 'I need a loaf of bread, ' would pick up a stone from the ground and say, 'Here, have this instead? '» Or he said… consider how fishing was done. Fishermen gathered their catch with nets, and sometimes a water snake would get caught along with the fish. Jesus says, «Which of you, when your son asks for a fish, would hand him a snake instead»? Pretty preposterous illustrations when you stop and think about it. Then he drives the point home. Here’s what he says: «If you being evil,» and he doesn’t mean worst evil possible, he just means in comparison to God, we’re evil.
«If you, imperfect as you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, do you not think God will do the same thing for you»? You’re his child. If you, being sinful, know how to respond to your children’s needs, how much more will God respond to his children? That’s the illustration. That’s the way we are to approach God in prayer. Yet, friends, I wanna tell you, there are many Christians who pray as if they have to break down God’s reluctance, as if they must bang on the door until he finally listens. That’s not the case at all. If there’s one thing you can take away today, let it be this. God is eager to hear you. He may not answer you the first time you ask, but if you keep on asking, he will hear you and he will choose the time of his answer.
God is eager to hear and answer your prayers, and he doesn’t need you to go through a formula to get your prayers answered. You don’t have to chant. You don’t have to count beads. All you have to do is ask. That’s it, just ask. And God, like a loving Father, is ready to listen. One thing I can tell you as a father is that one of my greatest joys along the way over the years has been to be the answer to the needs my children have. I now consider myself the ultimate safety net for the Jeremiah family. And everybody in my family knows that. And it gives me great joy to be in that place. You know, if that’s true for me as a human father, how do you think our heavenly Father feels? There’s more than one answer to prayer. I think we should talk about that for a few moments.
Some people say, «I pray and God never answers». No, what happens is you pray and you get an answer you don’t like. How many of you know there’s more than one answer to prayer? In fact, I have a little thing I wrote in my Bible some years ago and it goes like this: «If the request is wrong, God says no». How many of you know you’ve asked God for some pretty stupid things over the years? If you’d go back and realize some of the prayers you’ve prayed, I mean, God would never answer those prayers. You know better than that. You almost have to ask God to forgive you for being so insolent in what you’ve prayed for. I think when we get to heaven we will be thankful for all the prayers that God said yes to and a few of the prayers that he said no to. I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I think many of us could testify that we’re grateful for some of the times God said no.
Looking back, we can see that we were asking for the wrong thing. Our request was wrong, and when our request was wrong, God said no. Sometimes the timing isn’t right. I’ve run into that more than once. God says, slow. Is that an answer? Yeah, absolutely, we’ve all been there praying for something and it wasn’t the right time. In hindsight, we can see his wisdom in delaying the answers. Other times, God says, grow. We may have asked for something we weren’t ready to handle. And God, like a wise parent, says, «You need to mature first». But when all these things are true, when the request is right and the timing is right and we are right, oftentimes God says go. He answers. When we step into the adventure of prayer we can be sure that God will respond.
And then finally, the impact of prayer in verse 11. He says, «If you then being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to you who ask him»? Before we move on, I want to briefly emphasize this fourth point. God has good gifts he wants to give. The Bible says: «Every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from the Father in heaven». And when we pray, we should expect that to be true in the way he answers. Before we close our Bible, I want to highlight three important lessons about prayer that come from these verses. Here’s the first one. When we pray, we’re to pray personally. Prayer is personal.
Notice the wording in the passage. Every pronoun is personal. Prayer isn’t just a corporate activity, though praying together as a group is valuable. But group prayer is only as strong as personal prayer. After all, what is group prayer? It’s a gathering of individuals who each bring their own personal prayers. So we cannot pass off our responsibility to pray. The church, our Sunday school class, our parents, our Small Group, cannot pray in our behalf. Each one of us is personally called to pray.
Let him ask personally, and it’s an imperative. Secondly, we’re to pray specifically. Let me give you an example. Your prayer should be so specific that when God answers it, you recognize it. Lord, I need this and I need it by tomorrow. That’s how new Christians pray. They don’t over-complicate it. They heard that God answers prayers, so they just take it at face value. They haven’t yet learned all the religious reasons why that can’t be true. They simply go to God and say, «God, it’s me and it’s here and it’s what I need,» and that’s exactly how we should pray, straightforward and specific. Do you know, nothing is too insignificant to get on our prayer list. He cares about you.
Somebody’s saying, «I don’t want to ask, I don’t want to trouble God with that». You’re talking about the infinite God who has the capacity to care about every detail of every child of his, including you and including me. So we need to pray personally and we need to pray specifically and we need to pray persistently. I said at the beginning, we don’t have to bang on the door and beg, and that’s true. But it is also true that we need to continue praying. God will not necessarily answer our prayer on the first time we pray.
In the Greek language of the New Testament, there are two basic kinds of imperatives. One is called an aorist imperative, and the aorist imperative is used to describe an action that takes place once and for all. For instance, suppose you’re in a car and giving directions to the driver. At a particular intersection, you say, stop at that light. Stop is an imperative. But in that context, it is also an aorist imperative, a once-for-all action, stop. But if you were to say to the driver, don’t forget to stop at every light, that’s a present imperative with continuous action.
Do you know what kind of imperatives Jesus uses in this passage? All three of his commands, ask, seek, and knock, are present imperatives. They could be translated this way, keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking. Don’t ever stop asking. Don’t ever stop seeking. Don’t ever stop knocking. Just keep at it. Keep bringing your prayers to God. If you think your request is legitimate, keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking.
And let me put a parentheses in here. While you’re doing that, God may not answer your prayer, but he will change you. He will change you. God wants to teach us through persistent praying to wait on him and to watch. And while we’re praying and while we’re watching, God will do in us what he pleases. He’s working on us. He’s conforming us more and more to the image of Christ. And when you’re ready, he will surely give you the right answer. Jesus emphasized this lesson with two parables. He said, «So I say to you, 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 he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened».
The message is clear: never quit. In Luke 18, Jesus told about a widow who received justice from a corrupt judge simply because she refused to stop asking. In 1 Thessalonians 5:17 it says: «Pray without ceasing». That doesn’t mean walk around mumbling prayers all the time. It just means don’t ever get out of the mood of prayer. Don’t ever get in a place where you can’t say, «Lord, I need your help,» or «Lord, I need your wisdom».
Some of you have been praying for family members, but maybe you’ve given up because God hasn’t answered in your lifetime. Let me remind you that God is not on your schedule. He answering in his time, and he calls us to keep praying. Never stop asking. I want to testify to you today that God answers prayer. I’ve seen him do it. He can lead you to the right doctor in a busy secular hospital who just happens to be a believer. He can connect you with the world’s top specialist, 40 minutes from your home at just the right time. He can place your child in a university where unbeknownst to you, the president and athletic director are both committed Christians. He can even bring a young man to salvation just in time for a Christ-centered wedding. God answers prayer. I hope you believe that.