Prayer Changes Things Series

Jesus wanted His hearers to be encouraged that God is good. He had already taught them how to pray. Recognize God’s holy nature – hallowed be Your name. May the will of God be done. Give us our daily needs. Forgive us and help us to forgive. Save us from temptation. He had already said that this is to be the focus of our prayers. We might detail our needs before God or ask for a better understanding of His will, but that was the basic template. And here in chapter 7, Jesus didn’t repeat that I believe because His intent here is to get people to start praying.

If Jesus had said, “Ask, but make sure you are right with God first, and ask for all the right things, and then you will receive,” a lot of people wouldn’t take the first step of asking. And if they didn’t ask, they wouldn’t go deeper and seek, and ultimately, they wouldn’t knock on God’s door that He might give them what He really wants to give them.

There is a sense of intensification as we look at these words: ask, seek, knock.

Ask

When we ask, we are looking for information or help. We may think of it as expressing a wish or desire. For example, ‘How do I get from A to B?’ or ‘Can I have a hundred dollars?’ Prayer can start like this.

Point and Invest

Like the two high school friends who met up after many years. Jack asked his friend how things were going and he said, “Well, one day I opened the Bible at random and dropped my finger on a word – it happened to be oil – so I invested in oil. Boy did those wells gush! Then a couple weeks later, I did it again, and my finger pointed to gold, so I invested in gold and those mines really produced. Today, I’m as rich as Rockefeller!”

Jack was so impressed, he ran back to his hotel and opened his Gideon Bible, flipped it open, and dropped his finger down. He opened his eyes and there under his finger were the words: Chapter Eleven.

This story is a great reminder to us that prayer isn’t just a series of requests, but ultimately requires a more passionate desire on our part. Asking is the start, but it isn’t the finish.

Seek

Seeking is a more intense action. It’s like going on a quest to discover a way to obtain the thing we desire. We seek solutions to problems. We seek to convince people to see things our way. We seek to understand. It’s more than a simple question with a straight forward answer. Instead of just asking for a hundred dollars, we investigate the ways we might go about getting it, including everything from asking mom to writing a letter to the president. Seeking is much more passionate than mere asking.

Knock

And when we have asked, and our question has set us on a quest to seek out the object of our desire, we learn along the way. We might even find it necessary to adjust our desires and requests as we gather information. But one day, we see the answer before us. Our search is over. It is then that we much knock.

Knocking is what we do when we’ve finally reached the end of our quest. You don’t go on a treasure hunt only to find the chest and walk away without opening it. Maybe we knock on a few wrong doors along the way, but if we keep knocking, we will either receive that which we seek, or we may find something even better.