His will be done....

Jesus is very clear when He says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7).  But I sometimes wonder.  Sometimes I can ask, and ask, and beg, and it appears that my prayer goes unanswered, at least in the way I want it to be answered.  So what does Jesus mean when He says to “ask…seek…knock” and you will receive?

The key to understanding this exhortation from our Lord is that, through our prayer, God will give “good things to those who ask” (Matthew 7:11).  He doesn’t promise us whatever we ask for; rather, He promises that which is truly good and good, in particular, for our eternal salvation.

This begs the question, “Then how do I pray and what do I pray for?”  Ideally, every prayer of intercession we utter should be for the Lord’s will to be done, nothing more, and nothing less.  Only His perfect will.

That can be harder to pray for than one might first expect.  Too often we tend to pray that “my will be done” rather than that “Thy will be done.”  But if we can trust, and trust on a profound level, that God’s will is perfect and provides us with all “good things,” then seeking His will, asking for it and knocking at the door of His heart will produce an abundance of grace as God desires to bestow it.