Matthew 7:7-12 Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. 9 "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! 12 So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.
Introduction: The problem of unanswered prayer
I think the first question that most people have when they read verse 7 is, “What’s the catch?” When deals seem too good to be true we naturally look for the catch. You answer the phone: “Congratulations! You have won a free vacation to the Bahamas…”, and the first thing you do is start hunting for the catch. And you finally discover that everything is free except for the airfare, and airfare is $3000. So by the time you pay the extra-high priced airfare, there is really no difference between this ‘prize’ and what you would normally pay if you found some deal online. And so you think to yourself, I knew once I read the fine print it would turn out to be nothing special. And that is how a lot of people feel about verses like Matthew 7:7. It is hard to get very excited about the promise that God will give us what we ask for when we all know from experience about the problem of unanswered prayer. No one can deny the reality of unanswered prayer. So when Jesus said Ask and it will be given to you, we all know there has got to be a catch. Whatever Jesus meant by that, the reality is we continually ask for things – the salvation of loved ones, money to pay our bills, a spouse, healing for our marriage, physical healing, wisdom – all kinds of things we have asked for and have not received.
So what is the catch? Many people read this verse and think, “I don’t know what the catch is, but whatever it ends up being, I have a sneaking suspicion that this promise is going to end up being nothing special. Whatever the explanation is for unanswered prayer, the bottom line is the reality that I’ve always known – I ask God for things all the time that I never end up getting, and that’s not going to change.” So it seems like there is not really much different between having this promise with whatever the catch is, and having no promise at all.
What the catch isn’t
So we have two questions: What is the catch? With that catch in place - is this promise really anything special?
God only “answers” prayers for things that are already going to happen
Some people teach that the catch is this – you have to ask according to God’s will, and God’s will is His unchangeable plan, therefore the only time a prayer is answered is when you ask God for something that He was already going to do anyway. They say prayer does not really change anything – it just helps align you with God’s will. But if that were the case then Jesus’ words are misleading, because He makes it sound like when God gives you the answer to your prayer it will be because of the prayer – not because He was just going to do it anyway whether you prayed or not. And besides that, the book of James says that the reason we do not receive is the fact that we do not ask. So prayer does change what happens. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. The Bible is very clear that God acts differently when we pray than when we do not.
You have to believe hard enough that God will say yes
Another wrong answer to the question, “What is the catch?” comes from the health/wealth prosperity preachers. They insist that the catch is you have to believe hard enough that you will get what you are asking for. You have to convince yourself that God will say yes to your request, and if He says no it is because you did not really believe He would say yes. Every time you ask for something and don’t get it, it is because you did not have enough faith. But if you can just manage to convince yourself that something will happen – it will happen whether it is good or bad.
Can you imagine what a horrible life this would be if that were true? You ask God for something you think would be really good but it would actually be a disaster in your life, and God goes ahead and gives it to you anyway just because you believe He will? You pray for something that looks good to you but really it is arsenic, and God gives it to you? That would be awful!
Thankfully that is not how it works. Harold Camping believed with all his heart that the rapture would happen on September 6, 1994. So he wrote a book about it. I remember that vividly. I remember you could get really good deals on copies of that book in 1995. He believed it with all his heart and yet it did not happen. So we cannot accept the prosperity preachers’ answer, and we cannot accept the hyper-Calvinist answer, so we are still asking – what is the catch?
The catch: you must ask for a good gift
If you want to know what the catch is, and if you want the key to understanding this whole passage – and one of the most important keys to revolutionizing your prayer life and increasing your love for God, it is all found in one word in verse 11: the word good - or more specifically, the phrase good gifts. That is what Jesus says will be given to you if you ask – good gifts.
Not bad gifts
What does that imply about when we ask for bad things?
Matthew 7:9 Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?
If he asks for a good thing you do not give him a bad thing; but what if he asks for a bad thing? You are out for a hike with your family, suddenly you hear this noise behind you, and there is a rattlesnake ready to strike. And your little child says, “Can I play with it – please, Daddy?” What do you think God does when we ask for things we think would be good gifts but in reality they are a snake or a stone?
Let me ask you this – what do you hope He will do? Don’t you hope that He will say no? If you say, “Please God, let me hit this green light” and He knows that if you do you will end up at the wrong place at the wrong time and miss out completely on the blessing He has planned for you; do you want Him to say, “Well, you asked for it – here you go” and then let your whole life get fouled up because you asked for the green light? No – we do not want bad gifts from God – even when we ask for them. We want Him to only give us good gifts. So we would certainly hope that God would always say no if what we are asking for is a snake or a stone. And I think we can infer from Jesus’ words here that that is exactly the case. If the loving Father will not give you a snake when you ask for a fish then it stands to reason that He will not give you a snake if you ask for a snake either. He will never give you a snake. God will never give us a bad gift – only good gifts.
What constitutes a good gift?
But that begs the question: What constitutes good gifts? That is a monumentally important question. A huge amount of struggle and failure and heartache in the Christian life is due to the fact what we naturally think makes something a good gift is way off. And failure to understand what makes something a good or bad gift has ripple effects throughout the entire Christian life. And so we have a HUGE task before us this morning. Here is why:
Inverted vision
In 1952 a couple scientists (Snyder & Pronko) conducted an interesting experiment on human perception. They made prism glasses that turned everything upside down when you put them on. Then they had a bunch of people wear them for a month. When people first put them on the world looked upside down, and when they told them to point toward some object the people pointed to the wrong place. But after about a week they adjusted and everything seemed normal to them. If you asked them to point at something they could point right to it, and they got along just fine. Their brains adjusted so everything looked normal. If they were reminded – “Doesn’t everything still look like it’s upside down?” they would think about it and say, “Yes, I guess it does.” If they consciously thought about it they could tell that they were still seeing things upside down, but in moments when they weren’t reminded about it, everything seemed normal to them.
At the end of the thirty days they took the glasses off, and everything looked upside down to them. Once again they were disoriented, and could not accurately point to something in their visual field. But after a few days they recovered and were able to perceive normally again.
Every time we turn on the TV, watch a movie, listen to secular music, read a magazine, listen to conversations at work, read a secular novel, listen to talk radio, watch the news, or any other exposure to this world’s way of thinking, we put a pair of those prism glasses on our souls. This world sees spiritual things upside down and backwards. They see the universe revolving around man; the Bible says it revolves around God. They see the glory of God as the least important thing in their world; the Bible says it is the most important thing. They see self-esteem as a virtue; the Bible says it is sin. They see this world as the source of satisfaction and happiness, and God and His kingdom as dry and dull and boring and unsatisfying. But the reality is the opposite of that. The world sees everything upside down and backwards, and the more we subject ourselves to their influence the more we put on their prism glasses, and the next thing you know we see things like they do. Their values, attitudes, perspectives start to look real. And God’s ways start to look unreal.
And if someone asks us specifically which way is up and which way is down, we are like those test subjects. We know intellectually that God’s ways are right. But in moments when we are not being reminded, we see things the opposite of the way they really are, and that is reflected in our desires, our priorities, and our attitudes.
Every week we come to church and take those prism glasses off and try to see how God’s ways are real, but one day out of seven just is not enough. Just like it took those test subjects about three days for their brains to stop inverting everything, it is the same way with our hearts. That is why when you go to a retreat or a conference or someplace where the world’s glasses are off for several days in a row, everything changes. God’s ways seem beautiful and delightful and the world’s ways seem like the worthless, unsatisfying, lying garbage that they are. People come off those mountaintop experiences and say, “Man, I wish I could keep that forever” but then they put the world’s glasses back on and everything goes right back to being upside down and backwards.
An area of upside down perspective is in the definition of a good gift
And I think one of the biggest areas where worldly thinking has leaked into the Church and turned our vision upside down is in this whole area of what constitutes a good gift. What makes something good or not good? If I stand up here and preach about what is good and not good according to Scripture, but the world’s glasses are still on your heart so that what God calls a snake still seems to you like a good gift, then when you hear the catch – when you hear me say that God will only say yes to your prayers if you are praying for something that is genuinely good, something inside you will say, “Yeah, I knew that promise was a joke. Sure enough – it’s nothing special. I’m still not going to get this thing that I really, really want.” So my goal in this sermon is to not only get the glasses off, but get the perception adjusted right side up again so what God says is good really seems good to you.
Not relief from suffering
So, what are we naturally inclined to think of as being good gifts? I would say #1 on the list is the elimination of suffering. That is what most people are shooting for. People spend billions of dollars on counseling and therapy and drugs and all kinds of other things for the ultimate goal of eliminating (or at least reducing) the severity of their physical or emotional suffering. Most of the time if you walk up to someone and say, “How can I pray for you this week,” the average person will ask for something related to the reduction of suffering – either his suffering or someone else’s. From the world’s point of view suffering is bad, relief is good – period.
But if you take the glasses off it is easy to see that is not true. There are things in life that are way more important, way more delightful and desirable and fulfilling and joy-giving than comfort. Remember Paul’s terrible suffering in 2 Corinthians 12? He begged God repeatedly, “Take this suffering away,” and God said, “I’ll tell you what – the suffering will remain, but I’ll give you sufficient grace along with it.” When God says that to you, how does that hit you? When you get an answer like that do you feel like saying, “Huh – I ask for relief and You just give me grace? Thanks for nothing”? Or are you like Paul, who was thrilled with that answer. He said, “I will boast all the more gladly – that doubles my joy!” Sufficient grace – all the supply you need for fullness of joy, guaranteed! That is a treasure far greater than relief from suffering. When the world’s glasses are on, grace looks like a penny and relief from suffering looks like a truckload of gold. But when you see things right side up it is grace that looks like gold and relief from suffering that looks like a penny in comparison.
Potentially good gifts
So what constitutes a good gift? That is not as easy a question as it first appears. Our first knee-jerk answer is to say, “Oh, a good gift is anything that God says is good in Scripture.” So if you pray for someone’s salvation, you pray for a marriage to be healed, you pray for some injustice to be made right – those are all good things? Right? Well, actually, those things are only good if they do not interfere with something better.
Let me ask you this: Is it a good thing for people to honor the Lord Jesus Christ? Yes. So what if you lived at the time of Jesus, you saw His arrest, and you prayed with all your heart begging God to prevent the crucifixion. “God, don’t let Jesus die on the cross!!! Let Pilate and the soldiers and the Sanhedrin all drop to their knees and worship Him.” Would you be asking for a good thing? Not really. It would be OK for you to pray that because you would not be asking for a sinful thing. But praise be to God that He said no to everyone who was praying that – otherwise we would all be in hell right now. You see even potentially good things, if they happen at the wrong time or in the wrong context so that they interfere with a better gift, would not be good gifts. What if your child wants you to take him to the park? Normally that is fine, but if he asks you to take him to the park five minutes before you need to leave for the airport to take the family on a surprise trip to Disneyland, then saying yes to the park thing, and missing the flight would actually be cruel. If the Bible says something is good then that makes it a potentially good gift if it happens at the right time in the right context. So it is perfectly OK to pray for that thing, but even as you pray for it, keep in mind that God is not going to say yes if it would spoil some better gift.
So, when a child of God prays for something one of two things will happen – either God will give you what you ask for or He will give you something better. Those are the only two possibilities. The ONLY time God EVER says no to the prayers of one of His children is when He wants to give you something better than what you are asking for.
Sometimes the better gift seems worse
But sometimes that better gift does not seem better. If Joseph would have prayed, “God, all my brothers hate me. Please, change their hearts so we can have joy and harmony in this family,” God would have said, “No – I’m giving you something better.”
“Oh really? What’s that?”
“They are going to throw you in a pit and then sell you into slavery and later you’ll be unjustly accused and you’ll go to prison for a long time.”
At the time that probably did not seem better. But it was all part of God’s plan to save the whole family from annihilation and preserve the existence of God’s people.
“Oh, so if I just wait long enough then someday I’ll see how this painful ordeal God gave me is actually a good thing?” Not necessarily. Joseph was finally allowed to see it, but that does not always happen in this life. For example, in Job’s case, if God would have let Job know the reason for all his suffering it would have ruined everything. The purpose of Job’s suffering was to put the genuineness of Job’s faith on display, and to glorify God by showing that His servants will worship Him even if He takes away everything from them. So in Job’s case it was essential that Job not know why.
Exposes the genuineness of faith
But very often that is exactly the reason for hardship – to expose what is real and not real in your faith, and to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ by the part that is real. And both of those are wonderful gifts. If your faith is not genuine – you think you believe, but it is not really true faith, then it is essential that you discover that. It is like having the early stages of cancer – you need to detect it before it is too late. And God gives us suffering to do just that.
And He also gives us suffering to expose genuine faith for His glory. A great example of that is the woman in Matthew 15.
Matthew 15:22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terribly from demon-possession." 23 Jesus did not answer a word.
This woman is desperate. She is begging for mercy. She is coming to Christ and begging for deliverance for her poor daughter, and Jesus completely ignores her – like she does not even exist. Do you ever feel that way when you pray to Him – silence from heaven?
23 … So his disciples came to him and urged him, "Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us."
It is not looking great for this woman – but she refuses to give up.
25 The woman came and knelt before him. "Lord, help me!" she said. 26 He replied, "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs."
The Disciples are like My children and you, ma’am, are like the pet dog. It would be wrong for me to neglect them right now to attend to you. Her answer is amazing.
27 "Yes, Lord," she said
That is always the best way to respond to anything God says or does – “Yes, Lord.” “You’re right – I can see that would be wrong for You to neglect Your ministry to Your Disciples at this moment.” But she still does not give up.
27 …"but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table."
What she is saying there is, “Yes – it would be wrong for you to neglect Your Disciples to help me, but You wouldn’t have to neglect them. You wouldn’t even have to leave the table. You could just drop a crumb. You could just think one thought and my daughter would be healed. You wouldn’t have to travel to my house, You wouldn’t have to take any time – just say the word and it’s done and You wouldn’t have to take anything off the children’s dinner table.” And now we discover why Jesus was doing what seemed so cruel.
28 Then Jesus answered, "Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted." And her daughter was healed from that very hour.
This woman was a rare person. She is one of only two people in the whole Bible who are said to have had great faith. She had great faith, and Jesus did not want to just heal her daughter and let her walk away without letting all His Disciples and everyone who would ever read the book of Matthew how spectacularly beautiful and great this woman’s faith is. He wanted to expose the beauty and strength of her faith. But to give her that great gift required putting a hardship in her way. Suffering is a great gift because among other things it exposes what is false in your faith (so you get early detection before it is too late and the cancer kills you) and it exposes what is real in your faith, which brings joy and confidence to your heart and glory and honor to God.
1 Peter 1:7 [trials] have come so that your faith … may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
A good gift: Whatever God gives
So back to our question - what constitutes a good gift? It is very simple – a good Giver. A good gift is whatever God gives you. God only gives His children good things – nothing else – ever.
Deuteronomy 32:4 his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong
If you are a genuinely saved person, everything God gives you is good – no exceptions. If He gives you hardship, then that hardship is the best thing for you right now. If He takes a loved one, if He allows you to drop into depression, if He takes away all your money, if He gives you some licks with His rod because of some sin – whatever He does is always the best thing for you.
“But what if it doesn’t seem good to me?” Well then you have the world’s glasses on. If God gives you a good gift and it does not seem to you like it is a good gift that is a problem with your perception of the Giver. It is a lack of faith – you do not really believe in the goodness of God. If you have faith, and you trust Him to only give good gifts, then you will be excited about whatever He gives you – even before you find out what it is.
Hebrews 11:8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents … 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
Abraham was willing to leave home, leave everything behind and was actually looking forward to where he was going. So there goes Abraham, smiling and whistling, quickening his pace because he is so looking forward to getting where he is going. And someone walking with him says, “Wow, you’re pretty excited to get where you’re going – where are you headed?” And Abraham says, “I don’t know – but you’re right; I’m really excited to get there.” How can a guy be looking forward to getting somewhere if he does not know where he is going? Faith. Abraham had confidence that he was going to a place whose architect and builder is God. His attitude was, “If God is giving it to me, I’m excited about it.” (Just like Paul when the Lord said, “I’ll give you sufficient grace.”)
When people are suffering and they read in God’s Word that God is giving them a greater gift than relief, very often they will say, “I don’t want that greater gift. If this is supposed to teach me patience, or expose my faith, or whatever – I don’t want any of that. I can’t take God’s best anymore – how much blessing do I have to endure?” That is unbelief. That person does not really believe in the goodness of God. They think they are a better judge of what is good than God is.
Sometimes people are afraid to surrender their lives to God because they think, “If I say to God, ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to do; I’ll go wherever you want me to go’ I know exactly what He’ll do – He’ll send me to Africa. He’ll send me to some culture I know nothing about and require me to do some hard, painful task.” If you surrender your life to Christ completely there is only one thing He’ll do and that is give you good gifts. He will never send you to Africa unless going to Africa is, for you, a good gift.
And the converse is true – whatever God does not give you is not good. That thing you want so badly? If you did not get it yesterday then that means it would not have been a good gift yesterday. Evidently it would have interfered with something better. We need to disabuse ourselves of the absurd notion that God has ever, ever withheld something good from us. Why would He? If He puts His glory on display by giving good gifts to His children, why would He ever withhold any good gift from one of His children? He would not, and He has not.
Psalm 84:11 the Lord bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless.
Psalm 23:1 The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I lack.
Psalm 34:9 those who fear him lack nothing. 10 … those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
Romans 8:32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all--how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?
It is absurd to think that something God did not give you would have been a good gift, or that something He has given you is not a good gift.
I explain this principle to people all the time and they respond by saying, “Yeah, but I can’t imagine how this thing that happened to me could possibly be good.” That is because we are like infants compared to God. If you try to put some horrible tasting medicine in the mouth of a newborn, it will be impossible for you to convince that infant that the medicine is a good gift – even if it saves his life. He is incapable of understanding that. There are things that God does that in our wildest imagination we could not conceive of how it could be a good gift. But is God limited by our imagination? Are we going to say, “Well, if I can’t see how it’s good, then it couldn’t possibly be good because there is NO WAY God could ever think of something I haven’t thought of”? If you cannot possibly imagine in your wildest dreams how this thing could be a good gift then you have all the more opportunity to demonstrate great faith! It does not take any faith to believe something you can see.
So what is the role of prayer?
“OK, so God only gives good gifts. But if that’s the case – if there is already a one hundred percent chance that God will give me what is best, then why pray?
Good question
Before I answer that let me just say it is usually a good sign when people ask that question. People who do not trust God’s goodness at all will say, “Why am I not getting what I ask for? I prayed for this and didn’t get it – what’s going on?!!?” That is a sign of little or no trust in God at all – they just want what they want and are using God to get it. But then when they come to a point of seeing the beauty of God’s sovereignty, and the greatness of His power and wisdom, and the depth of His love, then the question becomes, “Why pray? I love God’s perfect plan. I love whatever it is He decides. It doesn’t matter to me what happens – whatever God decides is fine with me.” That is a mark of increasing understanding, and it is a good sign – but it is still not the end point. Anytime your theology causes a decrease in the urgency of your prayers, it is missing something.
Answer
And in this case the thing it is missing is the fact that God delights in doing what He does through our prayers. And so He set things up so that some things actually become good gifts only if you pray for them.
For example, suppose you are trying to teach your son about humility. The boy is wise in his own eyes, and thinks he knows better than everyone all the time, so you want him to learn humility. So one day he faces a hard problem, and you have the solution. But you know that if you give him the solution without him asking, he will assume that he knew it all along and would not have needed your help. And so it would not be good for him if you do that. It will actually harm him spiritually. So you keep your mouth closed until he tries and tries and tries and fails and cannot figure it out and gets frustrated and finally comes to you and says, “Please, can you help me?” And at that moment you are thrilled to help him. You had the solution to his problem all along, but giving it to him before he asked would have made it a bad gift. However, the moment he asked for it, it suddenly turned into a good gift. The reason you pray is because you can turn a bad gift into a good gift just by the fact that you ask for it.
There are all kinds of reasons why some gifts would be bad gifts if God gave them prior to you praying for them. Pride and self-sufficiency is one of them (just like the kid in the illustration). The best thing that could happen to us is anything that makes us more dependent on God and less self-sufficient.
Another one is this – if it happens without you praying for it you are less likely to see it as a personal gift from God to you. And that is one reason why God sometimes requires that we pray hard, and for a really long time, and earnestly, because the less energy you expend in prayer the less likely it is that you will see that answer for what it is.
When we fail to pray we create a situation where the best thing God can do is withhold His blessings. But when we pray persistently and fervently, the best gift is for God to go ahead and give you those blessings. So you actually have some control over whether a particular gift is a good gift or a bad gift. (Not total control – some gifts will never be good no matter how much you pray. But some control.)
No size limit
So, is the promise, Ask and it will be given to you absolute? Or is there a catch? There is indeed a catch. The catch is the statement only applies to good gifts. That is an amazing thing, because usually the catch reduces the value of the promise. But this catch increases the value. Usually that catch has to do with how much you get. In everything else we do, the main restriction is always on how much we can ask for. You might ask your employer for a ten percent raise, but not a ten thousand percent raise. When we ask for things from people the main restricting governor on what we ask for is amount. And when people make big promises to us but there is a catch, usually the catch limits the amount of the benefit. But for God the catch - the only restricting governor is not on how big the request is, but rather on how good the request is. There is no limit to the size of the blessing we can request – only the goodness of it.
Conclusion: The Gift of the Holy Spirit
All that is an introduction to my sermon. But since there is no time left to actually preach the sermon I will save it for next week, but before we close let me just show you one last thing that I think is just thrilling. This is another occasion where Jesus taught this same principle – but He changed a couple words.
Luke 11:11 "Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"
In the Sermon on the Mount He said, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask, but here He says “If human fathers give good gifts to their children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?” When you go to ask God for whatever you ask God for, whatever it is, God gives you the Holy Spirit. If you are a believer you already have the Holy Spirit in you, but when you ask for good things in prayer God gives you the Spirit in greater and greater measure. This is the lavishness of the way God answers prayer.
You ask for comfort, He gives you the Comforter
You ask for help, He gives you the Helper.
You ask for truth, He gives you the Truth teacher.
You ask for power, He gives you the Spirit of power.
You ask for wisdom, He gives you the Spirit of wisdom.
You ask for guidance, He gives you the Guide.
You ask for love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control – the fruit of the Spirit, and He gives you Spirit who generates that fruit in your life.
This is the generosity of God.
You ask for the gift, He gives the giver.
You ask for the effect, He gives the cause.
You ask for the product, He gives the source.
You ask for money, He gives you the mint.
Everything that is precious comes from the Spirit. He convicts us of sin and softens our hearts to repent. He opens our eyes to see the truth and love what we see instead of reject it. Every act of obedience and righteousness we ever do comes from His work in us. He fills us and gifts us and empowers us and enables us and guides us and teaches us and comforts us and gives us hope and has fellowship with us. All that, if you just ask.
Benediction: Romans 15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
