Ask me what you want and I will give it to you. It is an expression that could well be impressive if it is authored by the almighty. In general, we are not used to being treated with such open generosity, and being honest; life does not work that way, we have asked God for so many things that have not been granted…
How many have been the requests that have remained unanswered? It is a difficult number to calculate; or that makes us notice, that perhaps. When it comes to petitioning God, we may be doing something wrong.
However, we see that the God of the Bible is so interested in us. That we can find in his words several passages in which he seems to express precisely this level of benevolence towards those who adore him.
Ask me what you want and I will give it to you. Being that we all want to hear these words from God. Next we will study some biblical texts that are related to this radically complacent statement and that we all would like to hear, especially from the Almighty.
Ask me what you want and I will give it to you.
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
Because everyone who asks receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to whom he knocks, it will be opened. What man is there of you, if his son asks for bread, he will give her a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a snake?
If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him? Matthew 7:6-11
God, as a good father, loves his children and is interested in giving them the best, the previous passage clarifies it with two examples given by Jesus Christ himself, encouraging and motivating us to ask because “everyone who asks receives”, however, there is an implicit condition in the audience that Jesus is addressing on this occasion and that it is not good to ignore, they are children of God.
This is the first condition for our requests to be heard, to be children of God, to have Jehovah God as our heavenly father, for this the main requirement is to have accepted Jesus as savior and Lord of our lives as John 1 expresses it: 12.
In addition to this condition, the Bible also shows other conditions that help our requests to be heard, some of which are:
Do the will of God.
And we know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone fears God, and he does his will, he listens to him. John 9:31
God will not listen to our requests if we constantly live outside of his will, the words of the previous verse were said by a man blind from birth after being healed by Jesus, when he was questioned by scribes and Pharisees about how he had been healed.
He simply expresses what for him were the credentials that Jesus surely had, to be heard by God the Father and by virtue of this grant him healing, the man had to be fearful of God and had to do his will, to be heard, something which Jesus himself affirms on other occasions, such as John 8:29 where he says:
For he who sent me is with me; The Father has not left me alone, because I always do what pleases him.
A good guarantee that we will be heard in our requests to God is to be sure that we proceed according to his will.
Stay in the word of God.
The Bible says: if you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you want, and it will be done for you. John 15:7
It is a new ask me what you want and I will give it to you… God is interested in granting all our requests to the same extent that we stick to living as he has ordered us, of course, each person has their own challenges to obey God in the environment in which he lives, and must face such challenges with dignity.
Perhaps you say: God will not ask all his children to die on a cross to save humanity, and it is true, no more (literal) sacrifice is needed than the one that has been made by Jesus, but God will ask each of your children today, deny their own interests, and take their own share of responsibility.
Each person must take up his own cross as Luke 9:23 says, and this implies that there is a strictly personal effort, regarding things that each of us must do to do his will and remain in the word of God.
God wants to give us everything we ask for, just as a good father wants to give good things to his children, but our attitudes can greatly limit his benevolence, God is a father to us, not a genie from the magic lamp… we must have this into account when we submit our petitions to Him.
Receiving what we ask for should bring joy.
The Bible says: Until now you have not asked for anything in my name; ask, and you will receive, so that your joy may be full. John 16:24.
In this passage from the Gospel of John, Jesus encourages us to ask the Father in his name, to receive good things that make us happy and complete our joy, this implies that we must ask for things that really satisfy us and not just self-sacrificing requests.
God wants us to be happy with those things he gives us, that is why it is vitally important that we ask ourselves if what we are asking God for will really bring us satisfaction, or is it something that will become irrelevant upon obtaining it. God wants us to always be grateful for the things we receive (Colossians 3:15).
Why don’t we get what we ask for?
Having already mentioned the main conditions for our requests to be heard by God, I want to comment on what I consider to be the main biblical reason why many of our requests are not heard.
The Bible says: You ask, and you do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend on your delights. James 4:3
Selfishness in our requests is the problem, many times we put our own interests before those of others regardless of the consequences of said behavior, when we act like this we can tarnish our image as children of God, and that is the genuine reason why many times we do not we receive the things we ask of the almighty.
God has collective well-being in his heart, but we, unfortunately as human beings, often forget that happiness is only true when it can be shared.
We deny our circumstances and our luck if individually we do not feel happy, and that is when we blame God for everything bad that happens to us, for not attending to our requests, without realizing that these may be in open conflict with the well-being of those around us.
The Example of Jesus when praying.
…He went again, and prayed a second time, saying: My Father, if this cup cannot pass from me without my drinking it, your will be done. Matthew 24:42
These were the words of Jesus just before starting the path to Calvary, they were the moments in which he entered a point of no return before an imminent future of suffering and agony on the cross.
Perhaps Jesus had heard that phrase from the father, ask me what you want and I will give it to you, but in a critical situation he put the interests of the father before his own and his request was “thy will be done.”
This is the confidence that we must imitate in each request we make. Surely it would be a radical change that our lives would take if we learned to put God’s will before our own interests. Since if our goal becomes to do the will of God we can hear in infinity a murmur of that phrase ask me what you want and I will give it to you.