Good Gifts and Good Fruit Are God’s Will

Jesus says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” And yet, each of us also has our stories of times we fell on our knees and begged, laid on our beds and cried and pleaded for things to be different – for healing to happen, for a job to come, for all to not be lost – and we didn’t get what we wanted. More than a few times over the 25 years I have been a pastor, someone has asked me, “What am I doing wrong? I have prayed. Jesus said ask, seek, and knock and you will get what you pray for.”

Sometimes this passage, has been wrongly interpreted as Jesus promising us our wishes if we are faithful enough, if we behave and follow God’s rules enough, or if we ask in the right way….

So, when we don’t get what we wanted, we try to figure out what we did wrong, or why God didn’t grant our request – because “I asked! Why didn’t God give it to me?” “I sought, but I didn’t find.” “I knocked, and that door didn’t budge.”

The Pharisees in the crowds that followed Jesus would lay the blame on the person’s failure to obey the law. They believed that if they just got it right, if they just were good enough, the promises of God would open up. I think of them like safe-crackers with a stethoscope listening to the clicks, when they got the combination right, they believed that the treasures of God’s kingdom would be theirs.

Others in the crowd gathered around Jesus were superstitious. They were surrounded by a culture that embraced talismans and good luck charms, they had goddesses to pray to and offer sacrifices to for fertility and gods to pray to and offer sacrifices for rain. So, why would God, the one true God, who created and has power over all the universe, not grant God’s faithful who pray and sacrifice what they want? Here is the problem. The gods of fertility and rain never existed. They were human inventions, and praying to them and sacrificing to them did not work either. When we ask, seek, and knock, in our prayers we are not rubbing a genie’s lamp hoping to get our wish. When we pray, we aren’t approaching0 God like we do a vending machine, putting in our prayer, choosing our desire and watching it move forward and drop down. There is no shaking the machine and knocking on it to get what we want to fall.

When we pray, we may not get what we think we want. So, what does Jesus mean when he says ask, the tense of the verb is imperative perfect, so it means ask and keep on asking, seek and keep on seeking, knock and keep on knocking? And it will be given to you, you will find, and the door will be opened to you?

We only have to keep reading. Jesus compares God to a parent and says all human parents get it wrong sometimes. They are all sinners. They may try their best, but they fall short of being righteous. Still, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?”

Bread and fish were the staples of their diet. Their bread was a round, brown roll, not unlike a stone. Bread would sustain you, while a stone would give no nourishment. If you saw something that you thought would sustain you, but would give you no nourishment, even if you asked for it, would your parent give it to you?

And the word for snake was also the word for eel. They would get caught in the nets with the fish, but they were unclean and not good to eat. If you saw something that you thought would nourish you, but it was unclean, even if you asked for it, would your parent give it to you?

Of course, we expect parents not to give their child something that the child wants and thinks they needed, if it is ultimately not good for them. And, Jesus says, we’re sinful people and even we know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more will the heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask!

God’s Will is to give us good gifts. Stanley Saunders, Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Columbia Theological writes about this passage, “At the heart of the community of disciples is the promise of God’s faithful attentiveness, compassion, and provision – precisely what the disciples in turn are to seek in their relationships of justice and solidarity with one another.” Immediately after the assurance of God’s good gifts, Jesus follows with how we are to treat one another and a warning. Often, when we pray and listen, we get nudged to be part of God’s answer to prayer. Jesus concludes, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you,…and watch out for false prophets.” Jesus warns, “There will be people who answer your prayers with shouts of “Lord! Lord! And perform healings and drive out demons and they will miraculously give you what you asked for…” but they are wolves in sheep’s clothing. They are not doing God’s Will. They will never enter God’s kingdom.

You will recognize the difference by the fruit they bear, not by whether or not they can give you what you want and pray for. False prophets can be recognized by their desire for power or prestige or money. They will be concerned for themselves and not for God’s glory or for the well-being of those whom they influence.

John Stott, a British priest and theologian offered three ways to test the fruit of a person to see whether it is good or bad. First, look at the persons character and conduct. Those who are meek, tamed like a horse with a master to submit to God’s authority, and who are Christlike in their love, patience, kindness, goodness, and self-control may be true and not false. “On the other hand,” he wrote, “whenever these qualities are missing, and ‘the works of the flesh’ are more apparent than ‘the fruit of the Spirit’ – especially enmity, impurity, jealousy, and self-indulgence – we are justified in suspecting that the prophet is an imposter.” The second way to test a person’s fruit is by their teaching; do they confess Jesus as Christ in the flesh? And the third is to observe their influence on those with whom they have influence. He wrote, “We have to ask ourselves what effect their teaching has on their followers…Its gangrenous progress is seen when it upsets peoples’ faith, promotes ungodliness, and causes bitter divisions.”

Whether or not God’s Spirit is working through a person is revealed by their actions, not just their words. In other words, what we do shows what is in our hearts.

Reverend Dr. Jana Childers shares a story that is similar to the stories of so many people of faith everywhere who ask, seek, and knock. It is the story of Lucy, a young woman and mother with cancer who faced death. She recalls that:

“Time and time again last spring, Lucy urged me to accompany her to heaven’s door as she rang its bell, rattled its gates and slammed its knockers, not on her own behalf, but in prayer for those she would leave behind. We prayed for her husband, her little girl, her mother and her father.”

Lucy’s concern was not for herself. She trusted that she was in God’s hands. That God made her, God loved her, and that God’s Will for her life and her death when it came was a good gift.

Jana recalls:

“We prayed. Some of us for lack of anything better to do. Some of us out of hearts full of faith. Some of us because we believed Lucy when she said she could feel our prayers. She was buoyed by them, she said, reminding us of what Charles Williams called the intercessory prayers of believers: “the glorious web.” We did form a kind of a web with our prayers. Me praying for Lucy in Atlanta from my home in San Francisco, Ron from Indianapolis, Gene and Joan from St. Louis, Pam from Toronto, and countless others.”

The web of beloved community prayed, doing for Lucy as they would want Lucy to do for them. No one told her that if she had more faith she would be well. No one told her that God willed her to suffer. No one told her that her suffering was a sign of how strong she was because God wouldn’t give her more than she could handle. They prayed for her, lifting her up to God’s presence over and over again.

“In the last few months of her earthly life, Lucy’s own prayers were filled with a deep sense of God’s presence. It often came to her, she told me, wrapped in the words and music of a hymn. She came out of surgery with the words rolling up, filling her, coming through her – “The Lone, Wild Bird,” one time; and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” another time. Toward the end, she told me, it was the gospel songs that sustained her. As they welled up through her, she gathered visitors around her bed to sing them. This web of song and prayer sustained Lucy until the July morning when her feet were lifted off the path and she was ushered through the door. The word of Lucy’s death went out quickly through the well-established grape vine and by the time the hearse came to take the body, fifty-five friends had gathered. They flanked the walk and filled the porches of the little house and they sang the body out. They sang, ‘I’ll Fly Away.’”
I’ll fly away, oh, Glory
I’ll fly away
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by
I’ll fly away

In the lives of all the prayer warriors I have known there is heart break and loss – but there is not much despair. There is instead an invisible web that buoys them up and ultimately, carries them home. What did Lucy get for all her praying? Did she get remission? Did she avoid pain? Did she see an angel or was she offered a sign in the heavens? What Lucy got was what we all get, and what we ultimately all need. She got God and God’s Kingdom on earth, as the community gathered around her and supported her, and in heaven. “Ask,” Jesus says, “and it shall be given you. Seek and you shall find. Knock, and the door of God’s Kingdom will be opened to you.”