Matthew 7:7-8
“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; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”
For the past week, these words have prodded at me and have therefore been constantly on my mind. To set the scene though of why these words have been continually in the back of my mind, let’s analyze the passage first.
“Ask and you shall receive” is basically what Matthew 7:7-8 is saying. After these two verses, Jesus goes into elaborate detail to display that our Father, God, has such a love for us that it is unrivaled. Through comparing and contrasting mankind’s parenting skills to God’s, Jesus shows a pretty challenging statement. The statement is, God is the greatest parent that any of us could ever have. He is the ultimate gift giver.
Matthew 7:9-11
Is there anyone among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, although you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
We as humans are fallible, fallen, and well sometimes we just suck. But we know how to give good gifts to our children.Unless you hate your child, you’re going to want to bless, love, and give them great gifts. If WE give such good gifts then, just like verse 11 says, how much MORE will GOD give good gifts to those who ask Him? And I believe, know, and trust that God will do just that for us, His children! I step confidently in that faith! But yet, there’s a question on my mind: What if what I received is not what I asked for? Let me elaborate.
My father was the most godly man I know and he had such a radical love for God that it played out in his amazing dedication to God in ways I have never seen when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The dude was a saint as far as I am considered and his trust in God poured straight out from his soul into others because of God. The man who had no personal strength left in his cup was relying on the Father’s strength, and was therefore overflowing strength from the Father. It was amazing! So I knew and trusted that God would redeem the end result of my father’s cancer, whether it be death or life, to further the Kingdom of Heaven and to bring people closer to God, or to God for the first time. Hallelujah!!
. . . . But I never remember asking God for my dad to die.
When we pray we ask, and so I prayed, my family prayed, my church prayed, and others prayed for my father to be healed, and he wasn’t. Again, I believe my father’s death was used to further the kingdom! I do, and I have no resentment against God for what happened. But, I thought the Bible said when I asked for something, I would receive it. And again, I don’t remember asking God for my dad to die.
Between me, you, and whoever reads this blog, I don’t know why people die when we pray for them to be healed. Between the three of us, I have no more an answer to the problem of pain and suffering than the guy you got take out from at Pizza Hut. I don’t know. And I know that I am not the only person who has these questions. We all do. But I still trust God through it all. When we say we are Christians, we are saying we are Christ’s disciples. When we say we are disciples of Christ, it means we recognize God as our Father, and when we say God is our Father, it means that we MUST trust and have faith in Him through all that goes on in our lives. This question is not one that will ever break my faith. I still trust God and if anything, this question makes me rely on God even more so. This ridiculousness is so far beyond me that my mind would break at the sheer attempt of answering it on my own, so I NEED to rely on God through the Holy Spirit because He is the great counselor.
John 14:16
Then I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever –
Just because I don’t understand something, that doesn’t mean I make a basic conclusion, wrap a bow around it, and then give up on the topic. No, this is the kind of stuff we all must take to the Holy Spirit, aka “the other Counselor”, who Jesus was talking about in John 14:16, and I fully intend to do so the minute I get done with writing this blog.
This blog is one giant question with no answer to the end of it as of yet, and so sorry if you thought God might have revealed one of life’s greatest answers to me. Didn’t mean to get your hopes up. But this blog still has a point to it. What kind of Christian are you when the bottom drops out? What kind of disciple are you when you are faced with a question that is so difficult to answer? What kind of son, or daughter, are you when you don’t understand what your Father is doing, or why He does it? Where is your faith, your hope, and your God then? Ask yourselves these questions. Join me in my conundrum. If you are like me, then let’s pick up these dillemas, these crosses, and carry them to our Abba Father to ask about them. Let us pick them up together and carry them all the way home.
