ASK

Ask. Disciples should come to God in humility and awareness of need. Seek connects one’s prayer with responsible action in pursuing the will of God. Knock suggests perseverance. Disciples are to persist in prayer, confident that their Father will provide whatever is best for them, according to his sovereign, gracious will.

7:11 you … who are evil. Earthly parents have an innate impulse to do what is best for their children, yet they are flawed as a result of sin’s corruption of all humanity through the fall of Adam and Eve (cf. Rom. 5:12–14), and the quality of their parenting does not match God’s. This is an example of a “how much more” argument frequently used in Matthew and Luke (e.g., Matt. 10:25; 12:12; Luke 11:13; 12:24; cf. Heb. 9:14).

7:12 do also to them. Known as “the Golden Rule,” this verse summarizes the teaching of the Law and the Prophets (see note on 5:17). The way in which one wants to be treated should determine the way that one treats others. This should come naturally for believers who love God with all their heart and soul and mind, and who love their neighbor as themselves (22:37–40). See note on 5:17.¹

Jesus Teaches about Asking, Looking, Knocking / 7:7–12 / 64

Beginning in chapter 5, the Sermon on the Mount has thus far explained to Jesus’ followers the lifestyle and life attitudes that he expected from them. Some may have heard and thought the demands to be impossible. Here Jesus gave the answer to those thoughts and questions—ask, look, knock. The ability to live for God is only a prayer away.

7:7–8 Jesus’ followers can keep on asking, keep on looking, and keep on knocking, indicating the importance of persistent, consistent prayer in their lives. Only through prayer can believers stay in contact with God, know what he wants them to do, and then have the strength to do God’s will in all areas of life. God will answer believers who persistently ask, look, and knock. Believers, however, must not take Jesus’ words as a blank check; prayer is not a magical way to obtain whatever we want. Jesus had already explained some conditions on this promise: His followers were to show mercy and forgiveness to others (5:7; 6:12), avoid praying in order to get attention (6:5–6), and be willing to persevere in prayer. Our requests must be in harmony with God’s will (“your will be done,” 6:10), accepting his will above our desires.

7:9–11 If sinful people would not think of giving a child a stone that looked like a loaf of bread or a dangerous snake instead of a fish, then how much more will a holy God acknowledge and answer our requests? In these words, Jesus revealed the heart of God the Father. God is not selfish, begrudging, or stingy; his followers don’t have to beg or grovel when they come with their requests. He is a loving Father who understands, cares, comforts, and willingly gives good gifts to those who ask him. If humans can be kind, imagine how kind God can be.

7:12 This is commonly known as the Golden Rule: Do for others what you would like them to do for you. Many religions teach a negative version of this statement. Confucius said, “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” By stating this positively, Jesus made the statement even more significant. It may be easy to refrain from harming others, but it is much more difficult to take the initiative in doing something good for them. This is the key to the radical discipleship that Jesus wants. The Golden Rule is the foundation of active goodness and mercy—the kind of love God shows to us every day. This rule sums up all that is taught in the law and the prophets. When we follow the Golden Rule, we keep the rest of God’s commands.²

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 he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. ⁹ Or which man is there among you whom his son will ask for bread, and he will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a snake? ¹¹ If therefore you, being 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!”

Jesus has set a high standard before his followers in the preceding section; how are they to reach it? Prayer is an important part of the answer, and Jesus goes on to teach significant lessons about praying. Even sinful people know how to do good to their children; how much more, then, may they expect the heavenly Father to do good to his children! This is not Jesus’ complete teaching on prayer; for that we must remember the importance of forgiving as we pray for forgiveness, of asking in faith, asking in accordance with the will of God (cf. 6:12; 21:21–22; 26:39), and more. Here he is simply making emphatically the central point, that prayer to a loving Father is effective. The point is not that human persistence wins out in the end, but that the heavenly Father who loves his children will certainly answer their prayer.

7. Ask is quite general, but the context makes it clear that Jesus is referring to prayer. The general expression shows that no particular kind of prayer is in mind; Jesus is concerned with praying as such and telling his hearers that prayer is efficacious: it will be given. Seek is an interesting word in this connection. It can scarcely mean that the praying person does not know where to find what he is looking for; if that were so he would not be praying. The fact that he is asking the Father shows that he knows that what he seeks is within the gift of God. Perhaps the meaning is that the praying person does not know exactly what he should be praying for, but he knows that the Father will not lead him astray. There is also the thought of prayer with a greater intensity than would be implied when the person is doing no more than asking. And as he seeks the good gift from God, he is to know that he will find. For a second time we notice that the answer to prayer is certain. So is it with the third way of looking at praying: knock. It is not said at what the praying person should knock, but the imagery is that of a closed door that he cannot open (NIV brings this out by inserting “the door” before “will be opened”).³³ All who serve God know what it is to be faced with “doors” that are fast closed, and it means a lot that prayer will result in the opening of such doors. The three expressions underline the effectiveness of prayer. Look at it which way you will, it gets things done. All three imperatives are present, underlining the importance of continuous action.

8. For introduces a reason. In the heavenly court everyone who asks receives, and so with seeking and knocking. God’s grace and God’s love justify disciples in regarding prayer as a valuable weapon in their fighting the good fight. This verse takes up the injunction of the previous verse almost word for word (there is a change from “it will be given” to receives, but otherwise the same verbs are used). The repetition emphasizes the certainty that prayer will achieve the effect that is sought. Carson cites some significant words from Broadus: “One may be a truly industrious man, and yet poor in temporal things; but one cannot be a truly praying man, and yet poor in spiritual things.” Prayer is infinitely enriching.

9. Or makes more or less the same point in another way. Instead of saying simply what God will do in answer to prayer, Jesus asks a question from a situation in human life. He envisages a son asking his father for bread and inquires whether the father will in such a case give his child a stone. Jesus is reasoning from the less to the greater: if even an earthly father will give good gifts to his children and not bad ones, how much more will the heavenly Father do so! The question looks for a negative answer:³⁸ no one would do such a wicked thing. Stone is opposed to bread in the temptation narrative as well as here. Perhaps the thought is that the small loaves in common use resembled stones in appearance.

10. Or carries on the questioning, simply substituting a fish and a snake for the bread and the stone of the previous verse. France holds that “a snake might be taken for a fish, particularly the eel-like catfish of Galilee,” while Mounce sees in the snake “some eel-like fish without scales that, according to Lev. 11:12, was not to be eaten.” We cannot be sure which is correct, but clearly there was something that resembled fish but was not and that mocked hunger rather than satisfied it. Again the question looks for a negative answer. The repetition hammers home the point that even in this sinful race there is no tendency to give those we love and who depend on us some unsatisfying or harmful thing when we are asked for something to satisfy a real need.

11. The conditional of the first class assumes the correctness of the supposition, and therefore gives a reason for posing it. We should not overlook the way being evil is slipped into the argument. Jesus brings forward no evidence, but assumes this as so basic that it can be taken for granted, even when he is referring to a good action. As throughout the New Testament, the solidarity of the race in sin is taken as a basic fact: “An illustrious testimony to the doctrine of original sin” (Bengel).⁴¹ There is some emphasis on you. This does two things: it differentiates the hearers from Jesus and it conveys the meaning: you, members of a race that is sinful, you know about giving good gifts. For good see on 5:45; it here denotes something like “beneficial.” Having made the point about earthly parents and their children, Jesus uses a how much more construction to bring out the certainty that the heavenly Father (see on 5:45) will give good things to those who pray. He lays down no conditions, such as prayer in faith or in accordance with the will of God. Such things are made clear elsewhere and can be assumed. He concentrates on the wonderful truth that the Father gives to those who ask him.³

God promises to answer all genuine prayer (vs. 8). Everything that we need for spiritual success has been promised to us. God leaves us no excuse for failure. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you, for everyone that does such will receive an answer. You are not cut off in any way from the blessings and provisions of God for these are available to every one of His children.⁴

GOD HEARS YOU WHEN U PRAY

Ask your Father! In the Greek language, it’s written this way: Keep asking and it shall be given. Keep seeking and you shall find. Keep knocking and it will be opened. The tense used speaks of continual action. When you don’t know what to do, keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking.

Now, please bear in mind folks that God does not want us to keep asking and keep seeking and keep knocking because He’s playing hard to get. It’s not as though He’s holding a dog biscuit out to me, saying, “Speak, Jon. Speak.” No, that’s not the heart of our Father. Rather, He is determined to cultivate a relationship with me that will be as vital in the ages to come as it is presently. Thus, He says to us, “I want you to be continually asking, continually seeking, continually knocking because you need the exercise in developing spiritual communication skills. And as you do, I’ll take care of you. I’m not going to allow you to bite into a rock or eat a snake. I’ll guide you and give you wisdom.”⁵

GOD WANTS A RELATionship

generation are commonly frustrated by the impoverished strength of their prayer life. We all know that prayer is vital to our spiritual lives, and sometimes we simply see it as a duty that must be performed or a discipline that must be carried out rather than as an unspeakable privilege and joy and opportunity we have been given by the Father.

What Prayer Is Not

In the immediate context, Jesus has just addressed the problem of worry and anxiety, telling His disciples not to worry about food and drink and clothing. Jesus reminded them that their heavenly Father knows that they need all these things, and then He reduced the spiritual quest to its most important priority: “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matt. 6:33). It is in this context that Jesus adds His teaching about prayer. The three things He conjoins here are these: asking, seeking, and knocking. We have a tendency to think that these refer to three different aspects of the Christian life—seeking some goal to be reached, or knocking at the gates of heaven in order to enter—but all three are really about the overall matter of prayer.

This does not give us a room-service menu that we can call in to a cosmic bellhop and ask him to provide whatever we might want. I make that warning because we are living in a culture that has been enormously influenced by New Age thinking. Even people who are not self-consciously New Age in their outlook nevertheless have often been influenced by New Age ideas. New Agers practice a type of magic, the very kind of magic about which the people of Israel were so clearly warned by God in the Old Testament. The basic point of New Age thinking is that one can, by concentration and internal effort, change his or her environment. It is mind over matter, which is simply a form of magic. This notion has crept into the church so that people think, If I just use the right formula in prayer and ask exactly in the right manner, believing, I can make anything happen.

Jesus said, “If two of you agree on earth concerning what they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven” (Matt. 18:19). However, this does not mean that because we agree that war should end tomorrow, if we simply pray that way, warfare will end tomorrow. If we are going to understand what Jesus meant, we have to understand the whole of Jesus’ teaching on prayer, and not isolate individual aphoristic statements and turn them into magic formulae.

Ask, Seek, Knock

Having given that warning on how not to interpret Jesus’ words, let’s see what Jesus says here in Matthew 7: He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (vv. 7–8). To fully understand what Jesus is saying, we have to realize that when we ask, we must ask aright. We must not ask for selfish reasons. We must not ask in an attitude that blasphemes the Holy Spirit. We must ask according to what God endorses in His Holy Word. He could have expanded that little aphorism to give a thousand qualifications, but He did not do that, because He is giving us a general truth. It is important that we understand, without all of the technical qualifications, that Jesus wants us to realize that our Father is a God who loves to give to those who ask. As James wrote, “You do not have because you do not ask” (James 4:2).

Jesus has just told this crowd that our Father knows what we need before we ask Him (Matt. 6:32). So why now does He add this invitation for taking our requests before God? We do not improve God’s knowledge by our prayers. Our prayers benefit us. Distorted Calvinists believe that since God ordains all things, we need not bother to pray at all, but that is an offense to the biblical teaching. We are told in James’s epistle that “the effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much” (James 5:16).

Jesus does qualify His teaching: “Seek, and you will find.” I think He is talking about seeking in the context of asking. Scripture uniformly addresses our need to learn to ask aright. How can we know that our prayers are legitimate and not just selfish grasps for personal gain? In order to know how to pray correctly, we have to search the Scriptures. We do not know what to pray for, nor do we know how to pray.

So what do we do? We search the Word of God. Seeking is not something that unbelievers do; seeking is the business of believers, and in this case we are called to search the Scriptures. Paul wrote that “the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:10–11). The Holy Spirit does not search for His benefit. The Holy Spirit is God. The Holy Spirit knows the mind of God perfectly. Rather, the Spirit searches the Word of God for us. This is His work of illumination in which He shines light on the text. Have you ever read a text of Scripture, a text that you’ve read maybe ten times or fifty times or a hundred times and all of a sudden it jumps out at you in a fresh new way? This is the work of the Spirit, who has worked with the Word to pierce your heart. That is the Holy Spirit searching the Word, and as the Spirit searches the Word of God, so we are called to search the Word of God. Those who have the most powerful prayer life are those who have mastered the Word of God.

How to Ask

When we ask God for something, the two things we must always keep in mind are who God is and who we are. Our requests can never be demands. Jesus is not establishing for us an entitlement mentality. When we ask, we are to search the Scriptures, and when we ask God, we do not ask Him rudely. When we come into the presence of God, we knock at the door; that is, we come to God politely. We come with a gentle wrap, but if that does not open the door, we do not assume that God is absent. We learn elsewhere from Jesus that when we knock and God does not answer, we keep on knocking.

In the parable of the unjust judge (Luke 18:1–8), Jesus tells of a widow who persistently sought for a hearing before the judge, but the judge had no regard for men or for justice and did not want to be bothered by this poor widow. Finally, her persistence annoyed him so much that he listened to her case. Jesus’ application was that if an unjust judge who has no regard for God or for man would listen to a widow solely to make her go away, how much more will our heavenly Father, who is just and does care, hear our prayers? Jesus taught this parable “that men always ought to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). I have seen some spectacular answers to prayer, and the most spectacular answers have come after I have prayed with the utmost fervency and persistence. I have seen a correlation between effective prayer that involves seeking and knocking, not just asking.

We are encouraged to do this, Jesus said, because God is not like a human being. Jesus draws an analogy from our natural state when He says, “What man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent?” (vv. 9–10). If your little boy is hungry and comes to you asking not for steak or lobster but simply a piece of bread, you would not hand him a stone and say, “Chew on this and be quiet.” Surely there are parents like that in this world, but I have never seen anyone that heartless. Jesus says that since even in this natural world of fallen human beings, we give our children bread and fish rather than stones and serpents, “how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” (v. 11).⁶

1 Crossway Bibles. (2008). The ESV Study Bible (p. 1834). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

2 Barton, B., Comfort, P., Osborne, G., Taylor, L. K., & Veerman, D. (2001). Life Application New Testament Commentary (p. 35). Wheaton, IL: Tyndale.

3 Morris, L. (1992). The Gospel according to Matthew (pp. 169–171). Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: W.B. Eerdmans; Inter-Varsity Press.

4 Hindson, E. E., & Kroll, W. M. (Eds.). (1994). KJV Bible Commentary (p. 1901). Nashville: Thomas Nelson.

5 Courson, J. (2003). Jon Courson’s Application Commentary (p. 42). Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.

6 Sproul, R. C. (2013). Matthew (pp. 194–197). Wheaton, IL: Crossway.