Asking, Seeking, Knocking

In Pastor Marshall’s sermon on Sunday, in his introduction, he told the story of praying before meals as a child, “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.” He remarked that while he still prays before meals, and he’s still thankful for God’s provision, his prayers have changed a little since he was a kid. As he’s grown in his faith, his prayers have grown, too. And then he said, 

I wonder if some of us are praying 4-year-old prayers about trials. We haven’t learned how to pray grown-up prayers about the trouble in our lives — and we all have trouble in our lives of various kinds. We haven’t said, like the disciples, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And that’s my prayer for this morning, “Lord, teach us to pray, in this case, about the hard things in our lives.” 

From there, he walked us through four “grown-up prayers” from Psalm 86, and I found myself thinking: It’s good to be back in the Psalms. It’s good to think about prayer this summer.

At our Community Group on Wednesday night, we discussed the sermon and the topic of prayer. It was especially rich to talk about specific prayers — why we pray them, or why we don’t. We shared stories of prayers God answered, and others he didn’t — not in the details we desired. We prayed specifically, too, for a friend of a group member to find her wedding ring of fifty years, suddenly lost. It was a very ordinary, very wonderful time of Christian fellowship. We opened the Bible together, all of us in the same room, and that alone is always a win. 

But what stood out most to me was how Pastor Marshall’s sermon and our group’s discussion intersected with my own meditation on Psalm 27 earlier in the week. Verse 4 says:

One thing have I asked of the Yahweh,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Yahweh
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Yahweh
and to inquire in his temple.

The pairing of ask and seek in the same verse took me to Jesus’s teaching on prayer in Matthew 7:

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. (verses 7–8)

Ask, seek, knock — for generic things? Hardly! Jesus is talking specifics.

Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (verses 9–11)

God is willing and able to give good things to those who ask him. Now, that doesn’t mean he gives every single good thing we want in our timing, exactly the way we want it. And I say that realizing its painful implications. Still, it is good to ask for good things, to seek them, to keep knocking, and ultimately, in that asking, seeking, knocking, we land where David does in Psalm 27. 

His “one thing” was specific, but it wasn’t a thing. It was a Person. David longed for God himself — to have God nearer, to be captivated by his glory. More of God, close and clear. That is the highest prayer, isn’t it? The first prayer: 

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.

That’s where Jesus starts when we ask, “Lord, teach us to pray.”