Ask and it will be given to you;
seek and you will find;
knock and the door will be opened to you.
It is almost certain that we don't really believe these words of Jesus. If we did, our relationship with prayer would be different. For many of us prayer is a task to be performed out of duty and a sense of religious obligation. This isn't entirely bad. We pray because we know that we should pray, because God himself desires that we pray. But we tend to do so without having much in the way of expectation that our prayer will have an impact.
For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds;
and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
We would say to Jesus: 'I have asked, sought, and knocked, and yet my desires remain unfulfilled'. We should not be afraid to tell Jesus that we have difficulty taking him at his word when we test that word without apparent results. Jesus does indeed have answers to our doubts. The first answer might be that he never said these things would happen immediately, which is why we prefer the translation of this passage from the Amplified Bible:
Ask and keep on asking and it will be given to you; seek and keep on seeking and you will find; knock and keep on knocking and the door will be opened to you (see Matthew 7:7 AMP).
We might still be tempted to respond by asking him why these things that we desire might not be given to us immediately, since it is in his power to give them as he chooses. But do we not already hear in such a question the questionable impatience of children, unwilling to wait? We are in fact meant to be like children, but not in this sense. We are meant to learn to patiently trust God to give us what will be for our God when it will be the most beneficial. By making us wait God is calling us to cling to whatever was good in our desire while encouraging us to grow by, among other things, letting go of our desire to be in control.
Which one of you would hand his son a stone
when he asked for a loaf of bread,
or a snake when he asked for a fish?
In prayer we don't often know how to ask for the loaf of bread or the fish. We content ourselves to ask for stones and even for snakes. The Father knows that we have legitimate needs that we are trying to express, but knows better than to answer us literally according to our limited comprehension. He has better things in store for us than we can ask our imagine (see Ephesians 3:20). Let us not hold it against him that he has denied us what we've asked when we have in fact asked for a snake and to learn to look instead for what he desires to give, to look for the "how much more" of our heavenly Father.
Prayer is the sine qua non required to empower us to live the life of disciples. If we truly propose to love others even as ourselves we are going to need prayer. This prayer itself needs to be open to transformation as the Father continues calling us higher, and inviting us to have a heart that is more like his own heart. It was because of the power of prayer that Queen Esther was able to fulfill her role in salvation history. It can be so for us as well.
Save us from the hand of our enemies;
turn our mourning into gladness
and our sorrows into wholeness.
We are meant to go through this whole process with confidence, from beginning to end, ready even from the start to say with the psalmist, "Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me".
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