“Asking, Seeking, and Knocking”
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 he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks, it will be opened for him.
Matthew 7:7-8
What a precious promise is communicated in these verses. Some of you might already be shrinking back in unbelief. By experience you may have asked for something in prayer and not received it, you may have sought for something and not found it, or you may have faced doors that never opened no matter how hard you banged on the doors of Heaven. Your deduction from those experiences might be that God does not keep His promises, and therefore prayer does not work.
I will be the first to say that there are many things about prayer I still do not understand, but that does not mean that the promises of scripture are not true. There are many issues that need to be addressed. In fact, I will bring this point up repeatedly and eventually we will spend on a whole day meditating on it, but in order to have assurance that God will answer our prayers, we must pray in agreement with the will of God. There is also the issue of God’s timing, and here is where many people have a great deal of trouble because we hate waiting. Much of the time God requires us to wait on Him. God does not see time as you and I do. In fact, as we learn in II Peter 3:8, “But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.”
From our perspective it might seem that we have waited on God for years and maybe even decades, but from His perspective it might be only a few seconds. One thing I think we can trust is that God is always right on time. He is not early and He is certainly never late, but He always arrives on the scene at the precise moment He needs to and which will bring Him the most glory. Perhaps the reason some think these verses in Matthew 6 are not true is because we have either asked for things that were not in the will of God or we gave up asking, seeking, and knocking too soon.
Let’s take a closer look at these three different aspects of prayer. The word “asking” in our passage means to beg, crave, desire, the call for or the petition of one who is lesser in position than the one to whom the petition is being made. You most likely would not have started this forty-day expedition unless there was something you desired and craved for God to do. We are in no position to make demands of the Lord, but we can ask and we can ask and keep on asking. Today, why not ask God as honestly and with as much faith as you can summon for whatever it is that you desire Him to do. Some requests take more asking than others; I cannot give you a reason why. I believe that if we ask God for the right things, in the right time, and if we ask long enough we will get our answers. In many respects, this is the easiest part of praying. Little children understand the principle of asking and receiving - we ask and when God is ready and when He can be glorified the most, He furnishes and supplies what we have been asking for. I know there are times when our eyes tell us that it is not working. We my have asked in the past and still have not received. Believe me, I know. There are several things I have been asking for going on four years now. My eyes tell me that there is no use asking any more because I am never going to get my answer. Yet, the faith in my heart tells me to keep asking and trusting because the answer will indeed come at the right time. Now is not the time to throw in the towel and to give up.
So let us draw near to the Lord in our secret place and ask our hearts out. He is leading us on this journey. Let us ask Him for the impossible and see with the eyes of faith the day we actually do get to receive what we desired to see Jesus do for us.
The next level of praying is one of the sweetest. We are to ask and then we are to seek. What does Jeremiah 29:13 say? “You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all of your heart.” Seeking involves growing in our devotion to Christ. We should be continually seeking and striving to know Him more and to love Him more. Part of the meaning of the word “seeking” involves using our thinking, reasoning, and meditating skills to help us discover more and more of God.
A.W. Tozer once prayed a prayer that has stuck in my heart and soul. He asked God to help him love Jesus more than anyone in his generation. Seeking involves hours of adoration and intense searching of the scriptures to learn more and more about this Lord we serve and are asking to come to our aid. Tozer was known to spend hours on his face before God not asking for a single thing but simply adoring, praising, and seeking more revelation.
Could it be that if we feel somewhat distant from the Lord it is because we have not made time to seek Him in the secret place? We often think that true joy will come if we finally get what we have been asking Him for. True joy according to Psalm 16:11 is that we find more and more of God Himself. “You will make known to me the path of life; In your presence is fullness of joy; In your right hand are pleasures forever more.”
True joy and true pleasures are found in close relationship with God and not in the gifts that He bestows. We must come to a whole new level of understanding in our seeking through prayer. There is no greater adventure on the face of this earth than spending our days on a quest to seek to know God more intimately. There is always more to discover, new truths to learn, and new revelations to contemplate.
I once sat on a plane asking God to help me love Him more and seek Him more than anyone in the town I lived in. He simply responded that I would have to be willing to do things that no one else in my town had ever done before. That means more scripture reading, meditation, study, and memorization. That means more hours in seclusion in the secret place, enjoying, craving, desiring nothing more than God Himself. Oh, may that become the true desire of all our hearts.
Perhaps the most difficult position of praying is “knocking.” Knocking involves intercession and asking God to make a way where there seems to be no way. A couple of verses in Isaiah can encourage our hearts as we knock and ask the Lord to open impossible doors. There are places, positions, levels of influence, expanded territory that might remain shut to us without His intervention. You might need doors to open for the publication of a book you have written, a broader place in ministry influence, or opening the doors of closed nations to the gospel. I don’t know what doors have been long shut to you but by repeatedly asking God to open them those doors can be opened. In fact, fervent prayer is the key that can unlock those closed doors to us. “Do not call to mind the former things, or ponder things of the past, Behold I will do something new. Now it will spring forth; will you not be aware of it? I will even make a roadway in the wilderness, rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:18-19.) Those seem like two impossible things; people do not often put roadways in the wilderness because the trees serve as obstacles or as opposition to a clear roadway, but God is able to do that. He opens doors and moves both obstacles and opposition out of the way to accomplish His purposes. In the same way, you do not find rivers in the desert very often but God can push back the sand dunes and carve out rivers in a desert just as easily as He can carve out an open door for you or others in the advance of the gospel and His kingdom. “I will go before you and make the rough places smooth; I will shatter the doors of bronze and cut through their iron bars,”(Isaiah 45:2.)
There are places God is calling you that look impossible to get to from where you are. Through knocking, God is the One who goes before you to open doors that have far too long been shut and appear to be as strong as bronze. There are places God desires to advance the gospel that look locked up behind iron bars but God has the ability to get us through those iron bars. God has the ability to put us anywhere on this earth and before any person or group of persons He desires.
I believe that God desires me to continue this writing ministry and to be published on a broader scale. The prayer God has put in my heart is that the books He gives me to write will be distributed all over the world. That is not a door I can open on my own, but God goes before me to make a road in the wilderness, rivers in the desert and to shatter those doors of bronze that seem closed to me. He desires to do the same thing for you.
Steps to Trust and Obey:
Take time to ask God for the goals you set out with at the start of this 40 Days of Trusting and Obeying.
Spend some adequate time seeking Him like you have never sought Him before. Ask the Lord to intensify the desire in your heart to seek Him. Enjoy Him through private worship and adoration.
Where does God want you? What doors are locked to you but God has destined you to be on the other side? Knock through prayer and keep knocking for as many days as it takes until He opens them for you.
What is the Lord saying to you today? What steps of obedience do you sense Him leading you to take?
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