A man I have known a long time told me he had asked for the same thing every morning for eleven years and had begun to wonder what was wrong with the way he asked. The Bible does say it. Jesus says “Ask, and it shall be given you,” and the exact words “ask, and ye shall receive” are in John 16:24. The promise is a Father who gives good things, and Luke names one of them. His eleven years are his own story, and the passage sets no timetable for anyone else’s.
Ask, and it shall be given you
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
Matthew 7:7-8 (KJV)
Those two verses carry no condition at all, and Luke has the same saying in the same words. The title’s exact wording comes from John, on the night before the cross: “Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.” The World English Bible has it as “Ask, and you will receive.” In John it is an invitation to disciples who had never yet asked that way, and it ends on joy.
Bread and a stone
Matthew goes straight on to a father. “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?” Then: “how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”
Look at who is being examined in those two pictures. Nobody asks what the son wanted the bread for, or whether he had behaved that week. A father who handed over a stone would be the one at fault, and the whole argument turns on the fact that this Father never would. Nothing in ask and you shall receive puts the one asking at fault.
The friend at midnight
Luke sets the saying right after a story about a man who goes to a neighbor at midnight for three loaves. The neighbor will not get up for friendship, Jesus says, “yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth.” The man at the door got as many as he needed because he would not stop asking, which is leave to keep asking, with no word about how much asking is enough.
So keep asking for the thing you need, the job or the healing or the rent, by name. The saying gives you that: the man at midnight asks for three loaves, and the son in the picture asks for bread.
Then Luke ends the father sentence with a gift Matthew does not name.
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
Luke 11:13 (KJV)
Matthew’s “good things” is the open hand, and Luke names one thing that is surely in it. It is one more thing to ask for, beside what you have been asking for, and you can ask for both.
Promises with a clause attached
Where else the New Testament promises Jesus’ followers that what they ask will be given, the promise carries a clause. Five promises in John say “in my name.” Matthew himself has “if two of you shall agree” and “believing.” John’s first letter has “if we ask any thing according to his will.”
None of these asks for a set form of words. Right after “in my name,” Jesus tells the same disciples, “For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God,” so the asking rests on loving and believing him, more than on any choice of words. And James says “ye ask amiss” to people at war over what they want; he is naming their motive, and he gives no one a way to read another person’s unanswered prayer.
How I read it for years
I read Matthew 7:7 as a set of instructions, the asking as the input and the thing asked for as the output, and I treated every verse that complicated it as fine print. Read that way, an empty hand can only mean a faulty input, and the person to blame is always the one praying. Promises lose their setting easily: with God all things are possible is Jesus’ answer to “Who then can be saved?”, and it often gets read as a promise about plans.
The passage does not tell me why the man has been asking for eleven years, and I’m not going to guess at his life from a distance. It does not make the answer hang on the way he asks, and it gives him leave to go on asking.
Ask for the thing you need, and ask for the Spirit beside it. Luke puts that request where no father would refuse it.