With every new day, two of the great wonders of God’s world pass right before our noses.
These two marvels become so common that we often miss their glory. They are ordinary, in one sense, but from time to time, we do well to pause and stand in fresh awe of God and his special means for our good.
The first wonder is that God speaks. The God who made the world didn’t have to communicate with us. But he does. And he’s a talker. He’s talkative, we might say, speaking through the heavens and the earth, with all the more clarity through his prophets and apostles, and climactically through his own Son in human flesh, the divine Word incarnate.
It is stunning to have his word in the Book we call Scripture. The one who made us talks to us.
The second great wonder is that such a God listens. Just as he’s a talker, he’s also a listener, stooping and bending his ear to his beloved children, not just willing but eager to hear from them, inviting us into the back-and-forth of a real relationship. He speaks to be heard and listens to hear us. The act we call prayer is a wonder past finding out, in its simplicity and ordinariness and its deep mysteries and real-world effects.
However many unanswered questions we have about prayer, God makes it abundantly clear that he wants us to pray. He doesn’t just stomach our prayers; he delights in them. He invites them. He beckons. He woos. He calls for prayer and reminds us to pray, and works his sovereign angles to elicit our prayers. He wants to hear from his people.
And one of the great expressions of that heart is the many “ask whatever you wish” passages on the lips of his Son.
Ask Anything, Really?
Matthew, Mark, and Luke each capture Jesus’s almost over-the-top appeals to pray:
Whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith. (Matthew 21:22)
Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. (Mark 11:24)
Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (Luke 11:9)
These lavish invitations ring with divine authenticity. What human would dare concoct this and put it in the mouth of Jesus? Only Jesus, only God himself, could think it up and say it. And the appeals grow particularly thick in the Gospel of John, in the upper room, the night before he died:
Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. (John 14:13–14)
Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. (John 15:7)
I chose you . . . so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. (John 15:16)
Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full. (John 16:23–24)
Yes, these sweeping offers prompt questions, but before we run off to qualify them with context and conditions, let’s not miss the magnanimous divine heart behind and in them all: God wants you to pray. He’s not just willing to endure your voice. Your talking to him in prayer is his idea, his design, his desire. Oh, how he wants you to pray!
Fresh Air for Your Prayers
Now, I acknowledge that some theologians have conditioned this offer so much that in the end we end up praying less, and less hopefully, than we might have otherwise. That’s tragic. And that is to miss the point of why Jesus makes such unblushing promises. When he says, “Ask whatever you wish,” he’s emphatically not trying to shut down your prayers; he’s blowing fresh oxygen on whatever flame you have.
Jesus says, “Ask whatever you wish,” over and over because he really means for you to pray. And amid the various honest ways we might qualify the invitation, let’s focus here on the one main banner and the one boldness-instilling backstop to help us pray more freely, not less.
Banner: In the Son
The main compass Jesus adds in John 14–16 is his own name: “Whatever you ask [of the Father] in my name . . .” (John 14:13; 15:16; 16:23). “Ask me anything in my name . . .” (John 14:14).
To pray “in his name” does not mean that we add Jesus as a magic word or some sort of incantation. “Prayers in his name,” comments D.A. Carson, “are prayers that are offered in thorough accord with all that his name stands for” (John, 497). His name represents him — his whole person and work — and all of him rightly received and enjoyed in the person praying.
To pray in Jesus’s name is to pray as one who is up-to-date with the full revelation of the true God. Unlike Abraham, Moses, and David, we pray in Jesus’s name, knowing that God himself has come and dwelt among us in the person of his Son, that he has died our sacrificial death, and that he has risen to reign over all, right now, in order to build his church.
To pray “in his name” isn’t simply to wield a formula (“in Jesus’s name we pray”); it is to know him as history’s climax and hero and to gladly receive him as my own Redeemer and perfect righteousness. To pray in Jesus’s name is to recognize that God made the world and governs history and reconciles sinners in order to make much of his Son. To pray in Jesus’s name is to be awake to his majesty and to desire his glory and look forward to its increasing and expanding in time and space.
Which brings us again to this profound relationship between God’s word and our prayers. Jesus shares a remarkable insight about prayer, and answered prayer, in the condition that leads into the ask-whatever of John 15:7:
If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
How do we abide (or stay) in Jesus? Here he points to his words — and not that we abide in them but that his words abide in us. What do Jesus’s words reveal? His own heart and will, and the heart and will of his Father. So, a person who has Jesus’s own words (and will) lodged into his heart and mind “proves effective in prayer, since all he or she asks for conforms to the will of God” (John, 518).
Mystery remains, but I find it both illumining and inspiring to know that getting God’s words lodged into my spirit not only feeds and warms and forms my inner man but also makes me far more effective in prayer — because my very soul has been shaped to ask for the very things God himself loves.
Backstop: By the Spirit
One more piece to add is the precious “backstop” we have in prayer, if we can call the Holy Spirit that. One of the great wonders of the new covenant is that the risen Christ gives his Spirit to dwell in believers. His Spirit is not only with us but in us (John 14:17; cf. 7:38–39). And the Spirit in us both prompts us to pray and intercedes for us as we pray — to make our prayers effective even when we don’t know what to pray for:
The Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us [in our] groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:26–27)
So, yes, pray in Jesus’s name, and pray knowing full well that in Christ you have the Holy Spirit at work in you, prompting you to pray and bending your prayers according to God’s will, for your ultimate good and fullness of joy.
Unleashed to Ask
The Spirit in you is another expression of how much your Father wants you to pray. He doesn’t want you to be hesitant to talk to him. Not knowing what to pray should be no deterrent. Our Father doesn’t want his sheep to be sheepish when it comes to asking of him. He wants us to know he is generous, he wants to give us our holy desires, and he wants to shape us into the kind of sons that want what he wants, by wanting him most of all.
God wants to hear from us who live on the food of his word, lodge his will in our souls through his words, and then, in full view of Jesus, speak back to him with the boldness of a beloved child. A holy heart is unleashed to ask, and ask, and ask — and know that even as we don’t know how to pray, we have the Spirit in us interceding for us.
Desiring God