Persevering prayer 3
The Command to persevering prayer
7)““Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
Jesus makes it very plain. Again, he knows our need for Himself. He knows we cannot love or live or breathe or do anything without Him. He knows. He is the Master Physician. And because he knows all of our worries and anxieties and all of our worldliness and all of our judgementalism, and all our other sins, he gives us the cure for all our spiritual diseases: and that is: pray, seek the face of God, seek his strength and his fellowship and his presence.
James 4:3, the apostle, tells us: you do not have because you do not ask.
Jesus commands us: it is not a suggestion or a recommendation:
Jesus commands: ASK. SEEK. KNOCK.
These commands all point to the same thing or should we say, Person. God. Christ is commanding us to ask of him the things that we need. Christ is commanding us to seek his face, and will we then be content with other things? Christ is commanding us to knock at his door and enter into fellowship with Him. And as I said before, the asking and the seeking and the knocking is not just a thing that shoud happen when you have a need. That is what hypocrites do. They only come to God when there is a need. If the need is over they forget God. When they are hungry or unemployed or have marriage problems then they run to God and God helps them. But when their problem is fixed then they forget God.
When will we learn?
We will grow spiritually, we will advance spiritually when we take Jesus’ words to heart.
I want to ask you a personal question, how much time do you actually spend time with God alone in prayer each day?
10 minutes? 20 minutes? 30 minutes? An hour?
The examples we have of King David, Daniel, Jesus, Esra, Moses and others through church history, Luther, George Müller, Spurgeon and others, are that they would have prolonged periods of time of spending time with God. Why? Two things at least:
▪ they realized their desperate need for God
▪ and secondly they loved to spend much time with God alone.
If you do not spend much time, with God alone, it shows that you don’t love Him much or think that you don’t need Him much. It is actually very sad
Is the reason you struggle spiritually not because you spend so little time with God? I believe that is the bottomline. You love other things more than God.
We need to repent of these things.
God must be first in our hearts. He must rule supreme and He must be the Treaure of our lives. Nothing less!
So these commands of Jesus, are like medicine. They will heal you if you obey them. God will change you if you obey them.
Your worldliness and coveteousness and love of money will dissipate in the presence of the King of glory
Your anxiety will be flushed away if Christ is your trust and rock
Your judgementalism will be changed into love and forgiveness in the presence of God
Your hypocrisy will be crushed in the presence of the Holy Spirit
Truths Transform 