Luke 11:5-13--Our Father Hears and Answers Our Prayers

Luke 11:5-13
English Standard Version
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​5 And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, 6 for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; 7 and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? 8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. 9 And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 11 What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; 12 or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

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We have talked about how many of us read The Lord's Prayer and expect to jump into Jesus' teaching on forgiveness because it seems that phrase of "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" had His disciples tied up in knots, but Luke focuses on a different teaching here--that we should ask expecting the Father to hear us and give us what is best for us.  Jesus does so by making a few comparisons of human relationships and saying that God is better than those humans that do what is right out of selfish reasons, because the Father desires to give good gifts to His children (not only Jesus, His only begotten Son, but all those who have come into His family through adoption by way of Jesus' penal substitutionary atonement).

The first scenario involves a neighbor who is trying to pawn off his problems on his neighbor by asking to "borrow" a few loaves of bread to set before his guest because he failed to make adequate preparations himself.  Apparently this surprise visit comes in the evening after the neighbor that the man is asking to borrow bread from has already locked his doors and everyone is already in bed.  Apparently the unprepared neighbor is enough of a nuisance that the man will get up out of bed and open the door for his neighbor that needs something, if for no other reason than to get him to leave and let him sleep in peace--even though it may mean that he or his family goes without bread the next day.  This is not a very righteous reason to help his neighbor, but we don't have to worry about God being like this neighbor that locks the door and goes to bed and doesn't want to get out of bed to help us.  The Father neither sleeps nor slumbers, though we are encouraged by Jesus several times in the Bible to ask persistently, especially when it comes to asking God to fulfill what He has promised in His Word because we can be confident that He will not deny such a request.

So then we are told to "Ask," "Seek," and "Knock."  What is the context of this verse.  What is it that we are to be asking for?  Are we promised that if we ask for a million dollars that the Father has to give it to us?  Certainly not!  So then what is it that Jesus is teaching us here?  The man is asking for something that is a necessity.  It's his own fault for not being ready for his friend and the man doesn't have any time to make bread on his own--other passages seem to indicate that he doesn't even have the raw materials to make his own bread.  He must go to God and ask God to help him because the man has an obligation to meet and it's a problem he can't fix on his own.  It's okay for us to make our problems God's problems in this situation because time, talent, and treasure are of no issue to Him.  This man had no options other than to deny the hospitality that the Law required of him or to pester his neighbor for help (which the Law required the neighbor to help him).  Again, the focus here is on God though that He will not respond in such a way where we are being bothersome to him and He encourages us to be persistent, even to the point of being seen as being a nuisance by others if we are coming to Him for something that we need (notice in this story that the need is to be able to take care of someone else and is not selfish in origin) and we see that He is the only one that can provide it for us.

"For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened."  If we take that verse out of context and don't read the verses before it and after it, we would think that was license to abuse our relationship with God and that we could treat Him in the way the Lost Son did saying we just want our inheritance now (this is a wish the father in the story were dead because the heir doesn't receive an inheritance until the person willing the inheritance to the heir dies).  Our inheritance is not of this world and we need to remember that when making requests of God.  Jesus further explains the position of God towards our requests in the next analogy He makes.

Jesus turns the conversation from neighbor-to-neighbor to father-to-son.  Which father in the crowd, who Jesus would point out later were all imperfect, would give something harmful to his son when they asked for something to eat?  Again, we are talking about a necessity and something that is an obligation of the father to give the child in this case as it is his responsibility to take care of his children.  No good father would deceive their child and give them something that looked like what they asked for but was instead something else, especially if the "something else" was something dangerous.  We have a good Father in heaven who wants to give good gifts to His children when they ask for good things, and He knows what we really need before we even ask for it and is ready to give it to us.  He just wants us to be in a posture to receive it and ready to realize that He is the source of the gift so that we are ready to thank Him and worship Him.  Jesus is very specific here and says that all of this is about someone asking the Father for the Holy Spirit.

Ah, now that gives a lot more context to the "Ask, seek, knock" verse.  We aren't asking for material wealth, we are asking to receive the Holy Spirit.  We see that the Holy Spirit is freely given by the Father and the Son to all who belong to the Father and the Son by believing on the Son and calling on Him for salvation.  We need not worry about the Father locking us out and saying "Nope, it's too late, you should have asked earlier."  Even if we are on death's doorstep like the thief on the cross, we can come to Him in repentance and true faith and He will not deny us the gift of the Holy Spirit.  We also should expect that the gift of the Holy Spirit that we receive is genuine when our faith and repentance were genuine.  God will give the same Holy Spirit to us that He gave to the apostles and those at Pentecost.  So then this passage is talking about God not denying anyone that comes to Him for salvation.

Okay, so let's talk about that for just a second.  Haven't we already said that none of us come to God to ask Him for salvation unless the Holy Spirit is first at work in us to convict us and to bring about regeneration?  A dead man cannot ask, seek or knock, nor can he respond to anything.  But we who were dead in our trespasses and sins have been made alive in Christ through the power of the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit Who is at work within us.  So then, how foolish would it be to think that God would deny us the very thing that He put in our hearts and minds to ask for?  We "choose" Him because He first chose us.  It is the father who makes the choice to adopt the child, not the child that chooses the father, but the child does make a choice not to run away from home and to not rebel against his father's authority.  So then we should see that our Father loves us even when we had nothing to offer Him, that He cares for us as if we were His children, and that He will only give us good things--yet those "good" things are by His definition of "good" and not ours.  I say this because the Father did not withhold the cross from His only-begotten Son, and we would not imagine that to be something that is "good," but it was in fact "very good" in the eyes of God.  So good in fact, that the Father, Son and Spirit agreed to this plan before the beginning of time so that they could redeem a people until themselves who might be called the "children of God."  So then as a final thought, it is not us as the child that gets to decide what is good and best for us, but that is the role of the Father.  We must believe by faith that whatever He permits to come our way is what is good and best because when we can't trace His hand, we can trust His heart.