Matthew 7:7-11
For the next few weeks we are going to talk about these five verses. Jesus turns our attention once again to prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, although I think it can be argued that He never turned our attention away from prayer. Since telling us how not to pray in chapter six Jesus has taught us about the secret place, taught us the Lord’s Prayer, taught us how to fast rightly and then I believe that He has revealed to us some of the main hindrances to prayer. He taught us to protect our hearts from falling in love with anything temporary because inferior affections always hinder true love. He taught us to guard our eyes because they fill the heart and then overflow from our mouths because fascination with the world always dulls our devotion to our first love. He taught us not to worry because anxiety taunts us that we need to “do something” and questions the validity of love. Anxiety leads to judgment which leads to bitterness which limits the work of grace in our lives and there is no action more dependent upon grace than prayer. Prayer is essential for relationship with God, it is essential for obedience to God, it is essential to every relationship that comes from God; it is more than a gift, more than a discipline, more than a tool, more than an obligation, prayer is the food that God has chosen to sustain our souls, strengthen our minds, change our hearts and fulfill His purposes. Prayer is the one thing we are told to do without ceasing, it is what Jesus was found doing in His greatest and most difficult human moments, it was what was happening when the church was born, it is the one piece of humanity that we have been told is with God in His throne room right now and it is what Jesus has been called and commissioned to do at the right hand of our Father on our behalf at all times until His return. Prayer will always be more than we have understood it to be because prayer is the creation of God and as such it is greater than our knowledge, our understanding, our experience or our imagination; prayer is our gift from God for intimacy with God. Prayer and love go hand in hand, God gave us prayer because He loves us and we devote ourselves to prayer because we love Him. There are three questions about prayer that I believe Jesus answers in these verses and that we will study over the next three weeks: Why do we pray? Who are we praying to? And What are we praying for? “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you” is not a lesson on how to get God to do what we want it is a command, an invitation and a promise; it is for us to obey, for us to respond to and for us to remember that our prayers are not answered because of the words we use but they are answered by the One who birthed prayer within us. Today we will concentrate on the question, “Why do we ask?”