Ask -- Seek --Knock

Ask -- Seek -- Knock

Matthew 7:7-12

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."
(Matthew 7:7)

One day a dad took his six-year-old son fishing with him.
They put out several lines and then went up to the cabin.
After an hour, they came back down to the river to see if they had caught anything.
Sure enough, there were several fish on the lines.
The boy said, "I knew there would be, Daddy."

The father asked, "How did you know?"
He replied, "Because I prayed about it."

So they baited the hooks again and put out the lines and went back the cabin for supper.
Afterward, they returned to the river.
Again, there were fish on the lines.
They boy said, "I knew it."

The father asked, "How?"
"I prayed again."

So they put the lines back into the river and went to the cabin.
Before bedtime, they checked again.
This time there were no fish.

The child said, "I knew there wouldn't be," and his father asked, "How did you know?"
The boy replied, "Because I didn't pray this time."
His father questioned, "And why didn't you pray?"

And the boy said, "Because I remembered that we forgot to bait the hooks."

We should be constant in prayer, but we also need to bait the hooks.
We can't expect God to respond if we don't step out in faith and commit ourselves to the Lord's loving care.
This is what ministry is all about.

The Christian life is a life of prayer.
It is a matter of relating to God.
It is bringing to God our requests.
Too often we have the attitude which says: "I don't want to bother God with the small stuff.
I'll only go to Him in prayer when I have tried everything else."
God pays attention to all our needs.
God is a God of details and of small things.

The commitment of our time, talent, and treasures begins with prayer.
Christ's invitation to pray is contained in these simple words: These words are in the present tense and imperative mood.
These commands suggest persistence and determination.
Jesus is saying: We are to be persistent.
We are not to be discouraged.
Jesus is urging us never to give up.
We must bait the hook and pray, and God will answer.

All of us have been blessed.
We have experienced trying times.
But sometimes we feel as though we are in a spiritual wasteland.
We frantically run from fad to fad trying to find meaning and purpose.
And yet we come up short.
Why?

It is like the Israelites in the wilderness.
They are freed from the bonds of slavery in Egypt, but they complain to Moses and against God.
What good is freedom if they are deprived of the good things in life?
They would rather have the fleshpots of Egypt and be persecuted than run the risk of depending on God.
We would rather be miserable and have what we know, than to experience freedom
and rely on what we don't know.

Commitment to God forces us to grow in faith.
Many of us stay on the periphery of faith.
We want just enough to be sure of our salvation; but we aren't sure we want to go
the extra mile for sanctification. Yet, the harder we try, the more distant God becomes.
Many of us wonder if what we do or say makes any difference at all.
Where is God in our time of need?
Why can't we get answers to our questions?

The experience of a contemporary religious leader rings all too true for us.
He said: "So what about my life of prayer? Do I like to pray? Do I want to pray?
Do I spend time praying? Frankly, the answer is no to all three questions.
After sixty-three years of life and thirty-eight years of ministry, my prayer seems as dead as a rock....

I have paid much attention to prayer, reading about it, writing about it,
visiting houses of prayer, and guiding many people on their spiritual journeys.
By now I should be full of spiritual fire, consumed by prayer.
Many people think I am and speak to me as if prayer is my greatest gift and deepest desire.

The truth is that I do not feel much, if anything, when I pray.
There are no warm emotions, bodily sensations, or mental visions....
I have lived with the expectation that prayer would become easier as I grow older and closer to death.
But the opposite seems to be happening.
The words darkness and dryness seem to best describe my prayer today...."

Henri Nouwen wrote those words during the last year of his life.
Unfortunately, due to his untimely death, we don't know how he resolved his struggle.
We can be grateful for his honesty in articulating what each of us goes through on our spiritual journey.

Jesus urges us to ask, seek and knock in spite of the darkness and doubts.
Jesus invites us to grow through commitment and persistence.

What we have lost in our daily routine is a passion for the holy.
As we make our commitments, it is not a matter of "here we go again,"
but rather our effort to rekindle our passion for God.
Jesus challenges us to bring a whole new perspective to faith.

He bids us to ask expecting an answer; to seek anticipating God's will;
to knock confident that the way will be opened to us.
It is this perspective that enables us to say yes to Jesus and to plow through the empty
and dry times in life to experience the power and presence of God.

Too often we are like Janice Gravely, whose husband Edmund died at the controls of their
small plane while on the way to Statesboro, Georgia.
From the Rocky Mount-Wilson Airport in North Carolina, Janice kept the plane aloft for two hours.
As the aircraft crossed the Carolina border, she radioed for assistance:
"Help, help, won't someone help me? My pilot is unconscious."

Authorities who picked up her distress signal were not able to reach her by radio during the flight
because she kept changing the channels.
Eventually, she made a rough landing and had to crawl for forty-five minutes to a farmhouse for help.

This is an illustration of how we cry out to God for help, but keep switching the channels
before God's message comes through!
We turn to other sources, looking for human guidance.
When we seek God's intervention, we need to stay tuned for the answer.
We are quick to make a commitment, but equally quick to abandon it when we don't get immediate results.

We are like the child who asked God to help her friend Edie be better at school because she was so bad.
Within a week her mother noticed that she had stopped praying for Edie.
She asked, "Are you going to pray for Edie any more?"

"No," she replied, "I prayed for her last week and she is still bad."

Jesus implores us to keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking until the answer comes.
Sometimes, it requires commitment that lasts a lifetime.

What does it take to grow? When we grow, God's kingdom breaks in on us with a splendor that transforms our lives.
Let us strive to grow as we make our commitment to serve God with the very best we have to offer.

Sermon by Dr. Harold L. White


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