Ask and it will be given

What do we do when we come across Mt.7:7, "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you"? Do we just think this is what God promises, and believe it? Many have done that, and then some have even fallen away from God because they did not get what they asked for and concluded that God could not be trusted. So, what shall we do when some verse in the Bible does not seem to work in real life? We must realise that we have not understood the verse right. Or it may mean that we have not understood for whom those verses are meant or if we need to do something from our side.

When Jesus asked the Father to take away the cup of suffering from Him, He finished the prayer by adding, "yet not as I will, but as You will" (Mt.26:39). This gives us an example to follow, knowing that we don't always know what is best for us, and being willing to submit to God's will. This means that we can ask God for anything, provided we are willing leave it to God to make the decision.

To get better clarity on what Jesus really meant with the promise we read earlier, we can then look at what other parts of the Bible say about it. This is very important, because the Bible was not written like a text book, and we have to gather different sides of the truth from other places in the Bible. So we read in 1Jn.5:14, "This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us." Now we can understand that we can be confident of receiving what we ask for only if it is according to the will of God. Just as a wise father will not give his child whatever he asks for, our Heavenly Father knows what He should give, and should not.

If we don't understand this approach to the Bible, we can even go wrong totally with respect to our salvation. For example, someone reads, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household" (Ac.16:31), and takes it as if it is the whole truth. It is true that salvation is a free gift from God which we can receive when we put our trust in Jesus as our Saviour. But our understanding of 'believe' may not be clear or sufficient. When we look at other parts of the Bible we see that believing in Jesus as Saviour accompanies seeing ourselves as sinners before God, recognising the punishment we deserve and turning away from our old life of sin to following Jesus as our Lord and Saviour. These sides of the truth come out only as we read other parts of the Bible. People who simply hold on to this verse can even miss salvation completely. Another similar verse that does not provide the complete truth is Ro.10:9. This is a part of the truth, but as we have seen above, is not the full truth.

We see we need to make efforts to understand the word properly, check with general experience, see if we meet God's conditions, and also look at other parts of the Bible in order to get a better, overall understanding of the truth.