Matthew 7:7Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: 8for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. 9Or what man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; 10or if he shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

Prayer changes things … or does it?

If prayer changes things, how exactly are we to trust God’s sovereignty?
If the course of events finally turns on the wisdom, perseverance, and intercessory fervor of our prayers, then apparently there are many things that could go on in one fashion that only go on because of our intercession.

So is prayer changing something then, and if so, does that mean God’s sovereign sway over the whole is so contingent on our intercession that God’s sovereignty itself cannot, finally, be trusted?

I doubt if there are any here who can live with that interpretation of things.
On the other hand, if prayer doesn’t change things, if, in fact, exactly the course of events is all determined before the foundation of the earth, precisely why are we supposed to pray?

There is a passion in intercessory prayer in Scripture that does not feel like, “Okay, well I’m supposed to pray now to get this thing to come out right. I know this has been ordained from before the foundation of the earth. So here we go.” So now we pray, I don’t think it goes like that. So does prayer change things or does it not? On the face of it, you might be able to make an initial case either way.

Prayer changes things. There’s Jacob wrestling with God, refusing to let God go until he, Jacob, receives a blessing. There’s David giving testimony in Psalm 40. “I waited, waited on the Lord; he heard me and delivered me. He set my feet on a hard place. He took me out of the miry bog.”

There’s Elijah, praying for drought and praying for rain. James reminds us, after all, that he was an ordinary man. He prayed fervently, and the Lord heard his prayers.

On the other hand, does prayer change things? Jesus taught us, in what we call the Lord’s Prayer, to ask, “Your will be done,” which sort of covers it, doesn’t it?

In Gethsemane, the heart of his own prayer was, “Not as I will, but as you will.” Paul prays fervently three times for the removal of this messenger of Satan, this thorn in the flesh. Sometimes when Paul prays along such lines, people are healed. In this case, God simply adds grace. “Well, one way or the other, God answers, and God’s will, will be done.”

Even those who cry, in an intercessory fashion, under the throne in Revelation 6 are basically told, “Well, you can ask for relief all you like for those who are still on earth, but the time is not right.

Or should we say prayer change us?

That is often another formula that is used to address this sort of thing. Inevitably, there is truth to that, but if prayer simply changes us, why don’t we simply pray that God would change us?
There are many instances in the Scripture where we are praying for something else. If we say that in such praying, the prayer changes us but does not affect the course of anything else, then it really does seem like a belabored road to travel to ask God to change us.

Intercessory prayers in Exodus 32–34,

This setting is well-known. Moses has been up the mountain receiving the law. The Ten Commandments were given in chapter 20, instructions on how to build the tabernacle in the ensuing chapters, and so forth.

Moses has been away now for some time, and down below the people are saying, “Come, make us gods who will go before us.

Aaron’s perspective, verse 5, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” He still thinks that somehow he’s preserving covenantal faithfulness to Yahweh, but Yahweh now somehow imaged or presented as a calf.

So he is going to marry something of pagan influence, something of God’s self-disclosure, and form one happy religion that will keep everybody happy, but the Lord says to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt.” The amount of divine self-distancing from the exodus is remarkable. Not, “My people, whom I brought up, have become corrupt,” but “Your people, whom you brought up, have become corrupt.”

The nature of his arguments is stunning. “Lord, why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?” Does Moses have to remind God of the ultimate realities?

“Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people

Moses implication is: “Are you a promise-keeping God or are you not? That’s what you promised on oath in your own name. Will you keep your own covenantal promises or not?” That’s the structure of his argument, and we read, “Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.” This is one of about 40 passages where, in the Scripture, we’re told God relented, usually in connection with intercessory prayer.

Ezekiel, chapter 22 Intercessory Prayer

‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says’—when the Lord has not spoken. The people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the foreigner, denying them justice. V30 ‘I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one.’ ”

Now that’s dramatic. God is looking through the land for someone to intercede so that he would not destroy the land. Part of his theological condemnation is grounded in his sovereign perception that there is no one there to intercede, no one to teach the truth, no one to build up the wall. “I found no one.” If you take that back to Moses’ situation, God knows he has Moses with whom to reckon. God knows that. He has raised Moses up. He knows Moses will intercede, and he knows that he himself will relent.

How many other people have felt the impact of those words across the centuries? God is interweaving patterns beyond our conception, with only the finest, slimmest glimmerings of the intricacy of this pattern that God, in his sovereignty, is weaving.

Controlling theological reflections

God is utterly, unqualifiedly sovereign.

We simply must not duck that truth. You cannot take Ephesians 1 seriously and duck that truth. “He works out all things according to his purpose, for the praise of his glorious grace.” If you don’t believe this, you can either resort to very, very clever exegesis or use a pair of scissors and cut out Romans 8:28 from your Bible.

The texts of Scripture insist that he can turn the heart of kings anywhere he wants. If he can turn the hearts of leaders (and anyone else for that matter) anywhere he wants, then you cannot even suppose that God is sovereign over macro events, but at the level of individual human decisions, God has reserved a kind of special place there that is so tied to our independence, to our freedom, that God himself declares hands off and doesn’t quite know how it’s going to turn out. It’s very difficult to believe that in the light of biblical texts.

So far as our praying goes, this even means the Lord Jesus himself can teach us, “Be careful about rambling on in your prayers. God knows what you need before you ask him.” We’ll wrestle with that later in conjunction with other texts where the same Jesus equally teaches a parable to the end that we should always pray and not give up.

It’s complicated, but the very fact that Jesus himself can say, “Why are you rabbiting on as if you have to give instructions to the Almighty?” shows that, again, God understands full well that our praying is not to be conceived as something which somehow brings down blessings from heaven, which otherwise God would not have thought of.

From the movements of the galaxies to the tiniest subatomic particle, with a half-life of nanoseconds, nothing happens apart from God’s sanction. In fact, this side of the cross and resurrection, nothing happens apart from Christ’s sanction. He is the one who upholds all things by his powerful word. However we sort out our prayer lives, don’t ever lose this truth. God is utterly, unqualifiedly sovereign.

God is personal.

Persons think, have emotions, formulate thoughts, speak, interact with other persons, and sustain familial and other relationships (husband, wife, father, son, and so forth).

At the heart of these persons, then, is interaction, relationship with other persons. When they stop interacting person-to-person, personally with other persons, inevitably they become corroded, twisted, lonely, resentful. One of the great truths about the one God is that in eternity past, the Father loved the Son. The Son loved the Father. God himself, though always and only and forever only one, was always a complex one and was never, therefore, isolated.

This God interacts with his image-bearers, us, personally, using the attributes of what we normally consider personhood. So there is speech, imagination, emotion, interaction, and the like. So when we first hear God addressing human beings, for example, there is a person-to-person connection you do not get when God simply says, “Let there be light,” and there is light.

After the fall, God says, “Adam, where are you?” Did God not know?

As soon as we say these things, we immediately run into a difficulty, because in saying that God is a person we are using language that we use of all persons in our experience, and all persons in our immediate experience on this earth are finite, so that all of our personal relationships on this earth are with other finite persons, but God is presented as infinite; that is, transcending space and time, as utterly sovereign.

What does personhood look like in God?

God is never less than all he is.

It is not as if he is sometimes sovereign and sometimes personal. It is not as if he is sometimes holy and sometimes loving. It is not as if God is sometimes sovereign and sometimes good. He is never less than all he is.

There is admitted mysteriousness in all of this. Mysteriousness means there is a mysteriousness about God and his attributes, things that are above our capacity to perceive.
God discloses himself to us in the personal categories we understand, even while Scripture itself happily announces that God inhabits eternity.

Suddenly, you perceive that in passage after passage after passage, God’s sovereignty is universally sweeping, but he stands behind good and evil asymmetrically, such that the evil is always creditable to secondary causalities without ever diminishing his sovereignty and the good is always creditable to him. Nowhere is that clearer than in the cross.

We must allow each biblically revealed attribute of God (God’s sovereignty, God’s goodness, God’s compassion, God’s wrath) to function with respect to our prayer lives only as it functions within Scripture and in no other way.

Philippians, chapter 2: 12, “My dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” God’s sovereignty in causing you to will and act is used as an incentive to working hard, not as an incentive to fatalism.

“Well, God, if you’re going to do it, you don’t need my help. You’re sovereign; you’ll just do what you want.” No. Precisely the reverse. We are to work out our salvation with fear and trembling precisely because it is God working within us both to will and to do everything according to his purpose.

Jesus weeps over the city. Yes, yes, even in Gethsemane.… We focus all the time on the last part of the prayer, “Not my will but yours be done,” but never, ever forget the first part of the prayer. The Gospels show us that Jesus knows all through his ministry that he is heading to the cross. He knows that’s what the heavenly Father’s will is.

He has announced it to his own followers. He has predicted it again and again, in Matthew’s gospel, five times before the passion itself. He knows what the Father’s will is, and there you find him, in Gethsemane, saying, “Heavenly Father, if it is possible, take this cup from me.”

This suggests that even in the mystery of the triune God there are degrees of personal relationship that must not be swept under the carpet of God’s sovereignty if the price that is paid is God’s personhood. So in our praying we must never allow biblical truths to function in ways that tend toward the destruction of other biblical truths. Never, ever appeal to God’s sovereignty, God’s sovereignty even in election, to diminish your zeal in intercessory prayer that God would have mercy.

Formally, that’s correct. Emotionally, it is profoundly mistaken because it sounds, now, as if God is somehow hostage to our obedience, whereas we still serve the Lord Christ who promises, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” So we return to the book of Esther. “God will save his people, but who knows whether or not God has raised you up for such a time as this?”

We should never, ever allow God’s sovereignty to function in our lives in such a way as to diminish the biblical mandate for intercessory prayer, pleading with a sovereign, holy God, even while we acknowledge full well that should we do so it is the fruit of God’s powerful Spirit at work within us.

We say, heavenly Father, with the disciples of old, “Teach us to pray.” For the glory of your dear Son, and for the good of his blood-bought people, we beseech you. In Jesus’s name, amen.

It seems clear that Jesus’ main purpose in these verses is to encourage us and motivate us to pray.

1. He Invites Us to Pray

Three times he invites us to pray—or, you could say, if you will hear it lovingly, three times he commands us to pray—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, seek, knock, The repetition is meant to say, “I mean this.” I want you to do this.

2. He Makes Promises to Us if We Pray

Seven promises. Verses 7–8: 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.

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. Ask. Seek. Knock.

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.” Of course, he is talking about the children of God here, not all human beings.

5. We Are Coming to Our Father.

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!”

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.
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.

7. We Can Trust God’s Goodness Because He Has Already Made Us His Children

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?

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.”

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

No, we do not get everything we ask for and we should not and we would not want to.

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.