Ask, And You Shall Receive

“Let me hear what the Lord God will speak, for he will speak peace to His people, to His faithful, to those who turn to Him in their hearts – but let them not turn to folly. Surely His salvation is near those who fear Him, that His glory may dwell in our land.” Psalm 85:8-9

Imagine the aching void that would be left in your life if your prayers went unheard. Imagine what it would be like to have no-one you could trust for guidance, no one to comfort you or to give you hope.
We are told, in the Book of Amos, that God held up a plumb line, and took the measure of the people of Israel, and found them to be distorted and untrue. He plumbed their souls, and saw them to be lacking. Their punishment was to go unheard, to be spiritually lost and alone in a plentiful land. (Amos 7:8, and 8:11)
As Christians, we want God to hear us. We want to be able to offer our prayers, we want to be listened to, but we also want to be answered. We want God to communicate with us. And God wants to talk to us, and be heard, too. Just like any other loving relationship, a conversation of two voices.
Christs’ disciples also wanted to communicate with God. They wanted to know how to approach God in prayer, to be sure that they were listen to. They asked Jesus how to pray, and He taught them the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer so simple and powerful that it was taken up, repeated, passed on, and used by us all to this day.
Christ taught us that it is OK to ask for our needs to be fulfilled, when we ask for “our Daily Bread”; but also that it is acceptable to put our needs before any other asks when we are praying. God knows how difficult it is for us to do his work when we are bodily and spiritually hungry, lacking safety or shelter, afraid, or unheard.
In Luke 11:9-10 Jesus tells us: “Ask, and it will be given, seek and you will find, knock and the doors will open.”
If we hold a plumb line up to our own prayers, and see them to be justified and worthy in what we are asking, then we can be confident that we are heard. And we can be confident of an answer. It might not be the answer we were looking for but, providing we listen well, it will be as we ask in the Lord’s Prayer – “Thy Will be Done”.

I pray that we all come to have deeper conversations with God, as we uphold our lives in the strength of God’s promises, always striving to live our lives upright, steadfast, and plumb, in Christ’s image, now and always,
AMEN.