Ask Your Father in Heaven

December 31, 2006
By John Piper

Matthew 7:7-12

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and
it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and the
one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 9
Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a
stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11 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! 12 So whatever you wish that others would do to
you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

When you pause to consider that God is infinitely strong and can do
all that he pleases, and that he is infinitely righteous so that he
only does what is right, and that he is infinitely good so that
everything he does is perfectly good, and that he is infinitely wise
so that he always knows perfectly what is right and good, and that he
is infinitely loving so that in all his strength and righteousness
and goodness and wisdom he raises the eternal joy of his loved ones
as high as it can be raisedâ€"when you pause to consider this, then
the lavish invitations of this God to ask him for good things, with
the promise that he will give them, is unimaginably wonderful.

The Tragedy of Prayerlessness
Which means that one of the great short-term tragedies in the church
is how little inclination we have to pray. The greatest invitation in
the world is extended to us, and incomprehensibly we regularly turn
away to other things. It’s as though God sent us an invitation to
the greatest banquet that ever was and we sent word back, “I have
bought a field, and I must go out and see it,” or, “I have bought
five yoke of oxen, and I must go to examine them,” or, “I have
married a wife, and therefore I cannot come” (Luke 14:18-20).

A New Inclination to Pray
Well, that was then. But my prayer is that God would use this message
and this word from Jesus in Matthew 7, and other influences in your
life, to awaken a new compelling inclination to pray in 2007. I hope
you will ask God to do that as we look at this text.

We will do it in two steps. First, we will look at eight
encouragements to pray in Matthew 7:7-11. Second, we will try to
answer the question of how we are to understand the promises that we
will receive when we ask, and find when we seek, and have the door
opened when we knock.

Eight Encouragements from Jesus to Pray
Six of these encouragements are explicit in this text and two are
implicit. It seems clear to me that Jesus’ main purpose in these
verses is to encourage us and motivate us to pray. He wants us to
pray. How does he encourage us?

1. He Invites Us to Pray
Three times he invites us to prayâ€"or, you could say, if you will
hear it lovingly, three times he commands us to prayâ€"to ask him for
what we need. It’s the number of times that he invites us that gets
our attention. Verses 7-8: “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.” The repetition is meant to say, “I
mean this.” I want you to do this. Ask your Father for what you
need. Seek your Father for the help you need. Knock on the door of
your Father’s house so he will open and give you what you need.
Ask, seek, knock. I invite you three times because I really want you
to enjoy your Father’s help.

2. He Makes Promises to Us if We Pray
Even better and more amazing than the three invitations are the seven
promises.
Verses 7-8: “Ask, and [#1] it will be given to you; seek, and [#2]
you will find; knock, and [#3] it will be opened to you. For everyone
who asks [#4] receives, and the one who seeks [#5] finds, and to the
one who knocks [#6] it will be opened.” Then at the end of verse
11b (#7): “How much more will your Father who is in heaven give
good things to those who ask him!”

Seven promises. It will be given you. You will find. It will be
opened to you. The asker receives. The seeker finds. The knocker gets
an open door. Your Father will give you good things. Surely the point
of this lavish array of promises is to say to us: Be encouraged to
come. Pray to him. It is not in vain that you pray. God is not toying
with you. He answers. He gives good things when you pray. Be
encouraged. Pray often, pray regularly, pray confidently in 2007.

3. God Makes Himself Available at Different Levels
Jesus encourages us not only by the number of invitations and
promises, but by the threefold variety of invitations. In other
words, God stands ready to respond positively when you find him at
different levels of accessibility.

Ask. Seek. Knock. If a child’s father is present, he asks him for
what he needs. If a child’s father is somewhere in the house but
not seen, he seeks his father for what he needs. If the child seeks
and finds the father behind the closed door of his study, he knocks
to get what he needs. The point seems to be that it doesn’t matter
whether you find God immediately close at hand, almost touchable with
his nearness, or hard to see and even with barriers between, he will
hear, and he will give good things to you because you looked to him
and not another.

4. Everyone Who Asks Receives
Jesus encourages us to pray by making it explicit that everyone who
asks receives, not just some. Verse 8: “For everyone who asks
receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it
will be opened.” When he adds the word everyone in verse 8, he
wants to overcome our timidity and hesitancy that somehow it will
work for others but not for us. Of course, he is talking about the
children of God here, not all human beings. If we will not have Jesus
as our Savior and God as our Father, then these promises don’t
apply to us.

John 1:12 says, “To all who did receive him [Jesus], who believed
in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” To
become the child of God, we must receive the Son of God, Jesus
Christ, who gives us the authority of adoption. That is who these
promises are for.

For those who receive Jesus, everyone of them who asks receives good
things from his Father. The point is that none of his children is
excluded. All are welcome and urged to come. Martin Luther saw the
way Jesus is motivating here:

He knows that we are timid and shy, that we feel unworthy and unfit
to present our needs to God. . . . We think that God is so great and
we are so tiny that we do not dare to pray. . . . That is why Christ
wants to lure us away from such timid thoughts, to remove our doubts,
and to have us go ahead confidently and boldly.” (The Sermon on the
Mount, translated by Jaroslav Pelikan, Vol. 21 of Luther’s Works,
[Concordia, 1956], p.234.)

5. We Are Coming to Our Father.
We have implied it, now let’s say it explicitly with its own force:
When we come to God through Jesus, we are coming to our Father. Verse
11: “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!” Father was not a throw away label for
Jesus. It is one of the greatest of all truths. God is our Father.
The implications is that he will never, never give us what is bad for
us. Never. He is our Father.

6. Our Heavenly Father Is Better than Our Earthly Father
Then the Jesus encourages us to pray by showing us that our heavenly
Father is better than our earthly father and will far more certainly
give good things to us than they did. There is no evil in our
heavenly Father like there is in our earthly father.

Verse 11 again: “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!”

I am aware, and Jesus was even more aware, that our earthly fathers
are sinful. This is why the Bible repeatedly draws attention not only
to the similarity between earthly fathers and the heavenly Father,
but also to the differences (e.g. Hebrews 12:9-11; Matthew 5:48).

So Jesus goes beyond the encouragement of merely saying that God is
your Father, and says that God is always better than your earthly
father, because all earthly fathers are evil and God is not. Jesus is
very blunt and unflattering here. This is a clear instance of
Jesus’ belief in the universal sinfulness of human beings. He
assumes that his disciples are all evilâ€"he doesn’t choose a
softer word (like sinful, or weak). He simply says that his disciples
are evil (ponēroi.).

Don’t ever limit your understanding of the Fatherhood of God to
your experience of your own father. Rather, take heart that God has
none of the sins or limitations or weaknesses or hang-ups of your
father.

And the point Jesus makes is: Even fallen, sinful fathers usually
have enough common grace to give good things to their children. There
are terribly abusive fathers. But in most places in the world,
fathers are jealous for the good of their children, even when they
are unclear about what is good for them. But God is always better. In
him there is no evil. Therefore, the argument is strong: If your
earthly father gave you good things (or even if he didn’t!), how
much more will your heavenly Father give good thingsâ€"always good
things to those who ask.

And there is something implicit here that underlines encouragement #4
aboveâ€"the word everyoneâ€"“Everyone who asks receives.” If
Jesus says to his disciples, “You are evil,” then the only people
that can come to God in prayer are evil children of God. You are
children of God. And you are evil. In other words, even after you are
adopted by God into his family, sin remains in you. But Jesus says,
everyone will receiveâ€"everyone of God’s evil children! We will
see why in a moment.

7. We Can Trust God’s Goodness Because He Has Already Made Us His
Children
Here is another implicit encouragement to pray: God will give us good
things as his children because he has already given us the gift to
become his children.

This insight came from St. Augustine: “For what would he not now
give to sons when they ask, when he has already granted this very
thing, namely, that they might be sons?” We have already seen that
being a son of God is a gift we receive when we come to Jesus (John
1:12). Jesus said to the Pharisees in John 8:42, “If God were your
Father, you would love me.” But God is not their Father. They
reject Jesus. So, not all are the sons of God. But if God has freely
made us sons, how much more will he give us what we need?

8. The Cross Is the Foundation of Prayer
Finally, implicit in these words is the cross of Christ as the
foundation for all the answers to our prayer. The reason I say this
is because he calls us evil and yet he says we are children of God.
How can it be that evil people are adopted by an all holy God? How
can we presume to be children, let alone ask and expect to receive,
and seek and expect to find, and knock and expect to have the door
opened?

Jesus gave the answer several times. In Matthew 20:28, he said,
“The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his
life as a ransom for many.” He gave his life to ransom us from the
wrath of God and put us in the position of children who only receive
good things. And in Matthew 26:28, he said at the Last Supper,
“This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for
the forgiveness of sins.” Because of Christ’s blood, our sins are
forgiven when we trust in him. This is why even though Jesus calls us
evil, we can be the children of God and count on him to give us good
things when we ask him.

The death of Jesus is the foundation for all the promises of God and
all the answers to prayer that we ever get. This is why we say “in
Jesus’ name” at the end of our prayers. Everything depends on him.

The summary so far is that Jesus really means to encourage us to
pray. Why else talk like this about prayer if his goal for us in 2007
is not that we pray. So he gives us encouragement upon encouragement,
at least eight of them.

One Final Question
One final question: How shall we understand these six promises in
verses 7 and 8: “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”?

Does this mean that everything a child of God asks for he gets?

I think the context here is sufficient to answer this question. No,
we do not get everything we ask for and we should not and we would
not want to. The reason I say we should not is because we would in
effect become God if God did everything we asked him to do. We should
not be God. God should be God. And the reason I say that we would not
want to get everything we asked is because we would then have to bear
the burden of infinite wisdom which we do not have. We simply don’t
know enough to infallibly decide how every decision will turn out and
what the next events in our lives, let alone in history, should be.

But the reason I say that we do not get all we ask is because the
text implies this. Jesus says in verses 9-10 that a good father will
not give his child a stone if he asks for bread, and will not give
him a serpent if he asks for a fish. This illustration prompts us to
ask, “What if the child asks for a serpent?” Does the text answer
whether the Father in heaven will give it? Yes, it does. In verse 11,
Jesus draws out this truth from the illustrations: Therefore, how
much more will your Father give good things to those who ask him.

He Gives Only Good Things
He gives good things. Only good things. He does not give serpents to
children. Therefore, the text itself points away from the conclusion
that Ask and you will receive means Ask and you will receive the very
thing you ask for when you ask for it in the way you ask for it. It
doesn’t say that. And it doesn’t mean that.

If we take the passage as a whole, it says that when we ask and seek
and knockâ€"when we pray as needy children looking away from our own
resources to our trustworthy heavenly Fatherâ€"he will hear and he
will give us good things. Sometimes just what we asked. Sometimes
just when we ask it. Sometimes just the way we desire. And other
times he gives us something better, or at a time he knows is better,
or in a way he knows is better.

And of course, this tests our faith. Because if we thought that
something different were better, we would have asked for it in the
first place. But we are not God. We are not infinitely strong, or
infinitely righteous, or infinitely good, or infinitely wise, or
infinitely loving. And therefore, it is a great mercy to us and to
the world that we do not get all we ask.

Take Jesus at His Word
But if we take Jesus at his word, O how much blessing we forfeit
because we do not ask and seek and knockâ€"blessings for ourselves,
our families, our church, our nation, our world.

So would you join me in a fresh new commitment to set aside time for
prayer alone and in families and in groups in 2007. All the rest of
this Prayer Week, with its special booklet prepared for you, is meant
as extended application of this sermon.

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