Ask, Seek, Knock

Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes some big and sweeping claims about the Kingdom of God and how it can be experienced in our reality. There’s perhaps none more bold than what’s found in today’s reading, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.”

We find Jesus in these few verses setting our expectations high. Making a bold promise that seems too good to be true. Within isolation and through our modern Western view, Jesus seems to be promoting the Father as a heavenly Santa. “Simply bring all your heart’s shallow desires to Him and so long as you keep asking, He will give it to you.”

I can give countless examples where I’ve attempted this, as I’m sure many of you have and every six year old has, to find ourselves having our expectations let down. So perhaps what Jesus is talking about is something else, something that would actually exceed our expectations and give us something greater than we could ever even ask for.

In the broader context of this sermon, Jesus is talking about the coming of Heaven to earth; how the Father has chosen a bunch of nobodies, that’s you and me, to be a part of this move in our world. Jesus explains the nature of Heaven and what it would take for us to be God’s people, and sets some impossible standards: Be careful not to judge, don’t be anxious, love your enemies, control your anger. If you’ve read through the Sermon on the Mount in order, or if you were in the crowd hearing this, you’d be completely overwhelmed and convinced that, yes, being a part of God’s kingdom, seeing healing in my family, having God move in my life in tangible ways would all be too good to be true. This is when Jesus makes that bold claim, “Hey, I know this is too much to take on by yourself. But if you want this life. If you want to be renewed, God is a good Father, all you need is to ask and He will give it to you.”

When we read these verses without the rest of the sermon on the mount, our expectations flick to shallow wants. If we read the sermon without these verses we see this life as a dogmatic list of rules to serve a distant Kingdom. But when we bring them together, we find our expectations to be exceeded in every way. Jesus’ teaching to Ask, Seek and Knock pushes us away from our selfish desires, it also saves us from needing to perform for God or people’s approval, and instead Jesus moves us to know God as our Father. He invites us to the best thing we can have with Him. To share in the joys of His presence, allow Him to renew us and charge us to go into our world to see Heaven invade. It’s the marrying of Jesus’ commands with coming to the Father even before we’ve done any good that sees Him give us good things.