Do I believe that God wants to give me good gifts, and am I persisting until I receive them?

7 “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!

INSIGHT:  An old friend told me that his pastor told him that if he keeps asking God for something in prayer, that he is pestering Him and that it shows he didn’t have enough faith to believe him the first time he asked.  If that’s your belief and practice, you will be relegated to receiving only common grace, available even to sinners (Mat 5:45).  Relationships are about asking and receiving, giving and taking.  God wants us to ask, and to keep asking according to His will, because it means we are spending time focusing on, and being in relationship with Him.  Anything you acquire through faith and dependence on Him brings you good, and Him glory.

When I look back at all the remarkable answers to prayer I have seen from God, things like the 777 day divorce from my 1st unfaithful spouse, 11 years of Him providing my financial needs without me every asking a human for money or even making my needs known, building my tiny house not knowing where the money would come from, getting back my oldest son Tyler after six years of parental alienation, the amazingly redemptive gift of my loving & faithful spouse Lisa, after my two previously unfaithful spouses, the $44,000 direct answer to prayer to get our tiny house to New Zealand, God exposing the foolishness of my online persecutors, the court repeatedly denying my first spouses frivolous attacks on me in court, and Him keeping me out of jail after I obeyed Him to stop paying the child support for children who had been kidnapped through parental alienation, eight years earlier.  Not to even mention all the far superior spiritual gifts and answers to prayer that have come.

By the time the Lord did any of these things He had been bombarded with likely hundreds of my prayers about each.  It has been my delight to repeatedly petition Him about these and other important matters in my life.  I know by experience that God cares about the needs and the desires of His children, and I also know by experience that He delights in our coming to Him over and over, engaging Him in relationship.  How do you think it makes God feel when we come to Him exclusively and repeatedly about our needs and desires, rather than to the world or someone else? 

When we combine Lk 11:8 and Lk 18:1, we can see Jesus wants us to pray by asking boldly, continually, and never giving up.  This not only strengthens our faith, but builds our relationship with God as we spend time with Him in prayer.  If you want to be inspired to pray like never before, listen to the sermon Charles Spurgeon preached on August 12th, 1860, entitled “True Prayer, True Power”, in the related content below.  It’s the best I’ve ever heard on prayer.

While God does have a few good things for us in this life, in answer to our prayers of faith, they are only meant to be a few “good meals”, to keep us from collapsing on the way Home. (Mk 8:2-3) Meals are temporary.  They don’t last forever and neither does anything God gives us that is natural in this life.  None of my gifts will last, not my health, not even my amazing marriage to Lisa will last down here…all of it is fading away.  Our God is always thinking heavenly and eternal. Nevertheless, He wisely uses our desire for a few things in this life, as a way of keeping us in bondage to Him, focused on Him, and therefore not distracted or lost in lesser things.  Our wise Father also often balances His good gifts to us, with other weights of affliction, to keep us from ever getting too comfortable in this world, which is not our home.  Nevertheless, trust me when I tell you, even as someone who preaches that you must hate and lose your life in this life, that our God still has some very good gifts and meals for you on the way home.  Are you still asking, seeking, and knocking according to His will?  Are you always praying and never giving up?