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Pointers along the way #213

No ask, no get
- Jacob Ninan

The Bible says that many times we don't get what God wants to give to us, because we don't ask (Jas.4:2). Someone has said that when we stand before God in heaven and realise what all He had planned for our lives and how we missed them because we didn't ask, that would be a most tragic moment of our existence. Why don't we ask?

Perhaps we don't think we could or should ask. We may be imagining that God is so far above us that He couldn't care for us, that He is such a strict Person that we wouldn't dare to approach Him, that He might bring out all the lists of things we had done wrong in the past, that He might ask us to do some difficult things, that He would take away all the fun from our life and make it full of fasting, prayer and Bible study, etc. In other words, we don't trust God. Actually, we don't really know God, because God is not like any of those things we have been imagining about Him.

The Bible says that if we would come to God, we must first of all believe that He exists and also that He is the kind of Person who meets with those who seek Him (He.11:6). How can we know what kind of a Person He is? First of all by reading about Him in the Bible, and then by experiencing a relationship with Him in our daily life.

The Bible is, of course, the authority in telling us who God is and what He is like. Different people may have their own opinions, and Satan may whisper lies about Him in our mind. We may ourselves misinterpret things that happen to us and come to wrong conclusions about God. But God has revealed Himself to us through His word and especially through His Son Jesus Christ (Jn.1:18;Mt.11:27).

If we know about God only through the Bible without actually getting to have a personal relationship with Him, that kind of knowledge will have no life in it. If we don't know God in a personal, intimate way, and we try to ask Him for many things, is it any wonder if we are disappointed? If we ask Him something suddenly when we are in dire needs and all the time before that we have been living just as we pleased, God says He won't listen to us (Judg.10:13,14). (What we need to do is to first repent and come trusting to God (Is.1:16-18)). When we are born again and have a living relationship with God as one of His children, we get to know Him and His ways first hand. Then we also get to know what kind of things we should ask for, and how and when we should ask (1Jn.5:14).

Of course, there are things we may ask for and still won't get because God knows better than to give us all the wrong things we ask for (Jas.4:3). He is a wise Father who has our interests at heart, and not bound to some law that says, as some people make out, that He has to give us the things we ask for.

But when we deal with God as our Father, cast all our burdens upon Him, acknowledge Him in all our ways, lean on Him with all our heart and not our own understanding, and seek His will and His honour, God will give us all that we need out of the riches of His glory.

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