Again, when I was growing up and I’d read this verse, I thought Jesus was giving another random teaching separate from His current thought. Yet upon closer examination, I realized He wasn’t. Remember, Jesus is teaching about the ways of love in His Kingdom and what we would need to live it out. So He’s not merely saying for us to just ask God for anything we want, but for something specific that Luke captures in his account of this sermon in the Gospel of Luke 11:13, which says,

Friends, Jesus is saying, “If you want to avoid having a judgmental spirit… if you want to live out His ways of love in His Kingdom now… and if you want to keep the world and younger generations from having to say, “Where’s the love?,” then…

JUST ASK FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT

He is our most urgent need! As a matter of fact, if we have Him, then we’ll have all we need. And all we have to do is ask and He will be given to us!

Sometimes pastors and churches struggle to grow their church with new disciples. So a survey was given to a local church, asking people if they have been attending the worship service for a while and haven’t yet given their lives to Jesus in baptism. And if so, then why haven’t they. When the results came back many where stunned by the amount of people that had been attending for years and had never been baptized. They responded in the survey that they’ve wanted to be baptized for a long time, but no one asked them. Many people are just waiting to hear the Good News about Jesus Christ and then, just simply be asked to follow Him. Yet even more astonishing, is God just sitting in Heaven, waiting for someone to just ask Him for the Holy Spirit, so His power and love can be released in their lives!

Did you notice that when Jesus said to ask, seek and knock, these three words form the acronym ASK? It seems like God’s trying to get something across to us! The reason God wants us to ask, is because He knows we can’t live out His ways of love on our own. We simply cannot produce it. That’s why Paul tells us in Romans 5:5,

This is what Jesus was teaching about when He talked about the “oil” in His parable about the ten virgins in Matthew 25:1-13. We are to receive a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit, symbolized by the oil, by asking Him daily to fill us with a fresh anointing of His power and love, which is power to love!

This is why Jesus then says in verse 12, “…whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” This is what many have called the Golden Rule. Doing to others what you’d want them to do to you is beautifully and profoundly the out working of love in our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit poured out into us. As Jesus said in Matthew 22:36-40, this is what all of Scripture, which is what He meant when He said “the Law and the Prophets”, are all about… love. This is the “narrow gate” “which leads to life” that Jesus is referring to in verses 13 and 14. Few people find it and end up choosing the broad road that leads to destruction, because they don’t want to live out the ways of love revealed in Jesus Christ and poured out into us by the Holy Spirit! 

All God is saying to us is ASK! Ask, seek and knock, for He is more than willing to give Him to you! This is an invitation from Jesus for you to make this prayer for the reception of the Holy Spirit apart of your daily experience with Him. Every day we need a fresh anointing from the Holy Spirit in order to have the power to love like Jesus. It’s amazing to me that such a simple request comes with so much power!

Now, Jesus shifts to the results of asking for the Holy Spirit, which also comes with a serious warning starting in verse 20…