Joy in Asking

A reading from the gospel according to John, chapter 16, verses 23 through 30.

John 16:23–30

In that day you will ask nothing of me.

Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.

Until now you have asked nothing in my name.

Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.

I have said these things to you in figures of speech.

The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures of speech, but will tell you plainly about the Father.

And that day you will ask in my name.

And I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf.

For the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.

I came from the Father and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.

His disciples said, Ah, now you are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech.

Now we know that you know all things and do not need anyone to question you.

This is why we believe that you came from God.

The gospel of the Lord.

Grace and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Ask and you shall receive, that your joy may be full.

That is a striking promise from the mouth of Jesus.

And it's one that aims and points in a direction that we need to follow.

You'll notice he doesn't point towards particular outcomes or particular answers.

He says that the goal of prayer, the goal of this asking is the joy, that this is what the Lord our God would give us from our asking.

And that's a different thing than we often aim for.

When you and I pray, it is common for us to seek particular outcomes, perhaps a healing, perhaps a decision, perhaps some kind of change to circumstances that would be genuinely good to have.

Perhaps we're looking for answers, some kind of clarity, some sort of direction, one way or another, that would bring us peace if we could just have those kinds of answers.

And those are the kinds of things that Jesus teaches us to pray for.

Absolutely.

We should never get the idea that we cannot bring to our God all the little things and all the big things that we hope would happen in our life, and that we could bring them to God with great and sure confidence.

But here, Jesus is asking us to look also past those things to the joy that would undergird all of our prayer.

And to look and see there that the joy is already there in the asking, and that God our Lord wants to give us this kind of joy in and through our prayer.

Of course, you know that it's difficult to have much joy in prayer when you feel like you are failing at it.

Many people, perhaps most people, perhaps even every person, feels in some way or another that there is a gap here when it comes to our life, some gap between what we wish we were in our prayer and what we see ourselves actually at in our prayer.

And this gap can be a source of guilt or confusion, and it can sap that joy we have in prayer.

You might think that you don't pray often enough, or you don't pray well enough, or that you're not eloquent or elegant enough, or that somehow your focus is not laser-tuned enough to make your prayer worthwhile.

You surely know the experience of beginning to pray, and before you've even realized it, your mind is somewhere else thinking about a task you have yet to do, or a bill that is yet to be paid, and you kind of scold yourself and say, Look at that.

I can't even pay attention that long.

Or perhaps you have gotten into a mode where you say, I'm going to be really serious about this prayer.

I'm going to bring everything to God, I'm going to make this prayer count.

And then before long you've drifted off, your focus has flagged, and once again you feel a little guilt and shame that you couldn't bring that seemingly minimum level of effort and attention to your prayer.

And so prayer becomes the kind of spiritual discipline that we figure we must be failing at.

And therefore, the more we fail at it, the more guilty we feel.

And there's something we're supposed to somehow be mastering.

But if we aren't, then that must reflect poorly on us.

And this is what happens then.

The prayer becomes turned inward.

The prayer begins to be focused more on my performance or my ability or my faith or my strength or my focus or my attention or my endurance.

And you know how this feels.

Perhaps it feels a bit like showing up to a piano lesson where you know you practiced, but you didn't really get where you wanted to be, and now you're gonna sit there and you kind of hope that the teacher doesn't notice or doesn't say too much about it, and you can just get through it rather than your poor performance being drawn to yours and someone else's attention.

That is the kind of prayer that can sap the joy right out of it.

This inward-looking prayer.

You've been there, I've been there, and of course the trouble is the more inward focus we get, the more the guilt increases, the more that gap becomes apparent to us, and the less and less likely we are to want to return to prayer.

You know that sensation in every area of your life.

If it's not going well, it's not the kind of thing you go back to eagerly.

And so if that's you, then these words from Jesus today have something remarkable, something perhaps even surprising and joyful to deliver to us because Jesus is pointing us not actually to our own internal performance.

In fact, he says this in that day you will ask in my name, in his name.

And that little phrase does quite a lot.

For one thing, it means we're not praying in our name.

It's not that we're going to bring all of our accomplishments, all of our deep spiritual resources into play.

We're actually praying in the name of our Lord Jesus.

And that word carries a lot of weight.

Sometimes it's easy to think of that as kind of just a little phrase that we tack on to the end of a prayer, as if it's kind of like a signal that, hey everyone, the prayer's about to end.

Or it's maybe like a stamp that we put on the prayer to maybe guarantee that it at least lands at the right destination.

But when Jesus says we pray in his name, it's far more than any of those things.

It's actually Jesus drawing you and me into himself so that our prayer is prayed in him and by his power and by his strength.

You see, the Son and the Father have been in conversation, you could say, from all eternity, this eternal mutual love that is in the triune God.

Which means this kind of prayer and conversation between Father and Son has been going on long before you and I were even around to worry about the way our prayer was going.

And so Jesus is drawing us up and into Him and into His prayer and into His name.

So that you, when you pray, are not standing outside a conversation.

You're not trying to beat your way down through a door to get into this conversation.

You are brought right into the fullness of God, the fullness of relationship with Him, and all of the glory of prayer then depends not on you, but depends on Christ our Lord.

Depends on His grace, His mercy, His power, His strength, all that He has ever said and all that He has ever done.

This He gives to you, and He draws you into that status, draws you into that place, into that great loving relationship, so that when you come and you bring your prayers to God, you are not there to bring a performance, you are not there to bring something that you have to stick the landing and really nail for it to work.

You are being drawn into a participation with God that has been around long before us and will endure into eternity.

That is the scope of what we're dealing with.

And that is the foundation on which our prayer is built, so that you are not going at this on your own power, but you are joining this prayer, you could almost say a prayer in progress.

And it's from this then that a startling, breathtaking truth comes to bear.

Something that Jesus says.

He says, I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf, for the Father Himself loves you.

Just pause long enough to linger on that momentous announcement.

That it is not as if Jesus is your agent or your broker or your middleman, the person that you kind of hand things to and kind of hope he can do some special persuasion.

Jesus says that you and I have this direct access to the Father because we are in the Son.

That means that we're not trying to break through some bureaucratic chain or get through some sort of barrier to have our prayers come to the one who can hear them and answer them graciously.

He says right here that the Father Himself loves you.

Because you're in Christ, it means you're reconciled to God.

It means there's no condemnation for you.

The sin and the guilt and the shame that would otherwise be those barriers between you and the Father have been removed by the life, death, and resurrection of the Son.

By the blood of Jesus given and shed for you on the cross, that reconciliation is now true and real.

It is the foundation through which, on which this relationship of love is built.

The door is open then, and it means you and I are free to enter it with our prayers and petitions, knowing that the joy and the gladness we have comes from this standing with the Father.

And this changes so much, perhaps everything, about how we might approach this question of prayer.

It means we come with peace and rest, already having been one for us and accomplished in Christ's name, so that when we bring our petitions to the Father, we're not coming to some courtroom where we hope we have standing, or we hope we get a hearing, or we hope we get the outcome we want, but we're coming to a dear Father who loves us on account of Christ our Lord and Savior.

That starts to make this promise from Jesus really land, that if you ask, you will receive the joy and fullness of that joy that He desires to give to you and me.

This means we can reframe our prayer.

It means that if our prayer were only about the answers and only about the particular outcomes, then our joy would be only as durable as those outcomes might be.

Or our joy would be contingent only on getting the particular answer or outcome we want.

And of course, you know that in this world that can be a shaky place to stand.

Because outcomes can come and go.

Sometimes they happen, sometimes they don't.

And perhaps most maddening of all, sometimes even when we get the things that we want or the things we ask for, a whole new host of unintended and unanticipated consequences come on the other side, and a whole new range of needs and wants unfolds before us.

And there we are, once again, right back, seemingly, at square one.

And so if our joy is built on those outcomes and answers, then that joy is going to be uneven, is going to be contingent, and is going to feel brittle and shaky.

But when we take this word from Jesus at face value and realize that we are in him, and that in him we have the full love of the Father, then we start to see behind it all this joy opening up that's available to us, not because we're getting the answers we want at any given day, but because at all times we have access to the Father who loves us.

That you and I are in the Son, that our life, the scriptures say, is hidden in him.

It's as if everything that we are, whether the joys and gladnesses of life or the deep sorrows, is wrapped up in him who has been through and seen the full range of it.

And because you're hidden in him, it means that the greatest relationship that you need, the greatest source of peace and comfort that any human craves, to be at one with the source of all things, the creator, the Lord, the God, that this is sure and certain, as certain as the Lord Jesus has lived and died and risen again.

So that you can bring all of those prayers and petitions, yes, the answers you want, yes, the outcomes you hope happen.

But knowing at all times that the person you're bringing that to can hold it all in his loving hands, guide and keep and guard and direct you in all ways, so that even if things don't play out the way you hoped they would, the one thing that cannot be taken away is your sure and certain joy in having access to the Father and security in the Son, to finally be free and relieved of the endless need to bring your spiritual performance to God and instead to receive his gifts handed over freely to you in the person of Jesus Christ.

What it looks and feels like is entering something that is bigger than what we can bring on our own.

A big, spacious place where there is room for God's love, room for God's action, and room for God's joy.

And not partial joy contingent only on the results, but joy in the full, because it is only depending on the fullness of God.

And that is a fullness that no circumstance and no situation can diminish.

For we have the full joy, the full gladness, the full freedom and forgiveness in the Son of God, our Lord and our Savior.

And so from all this, we simply say, Let us pray.

This is what we do when we see this truth, hear it, and take it to heart.

Let us pray.

Let us pray together, let us pray in our homes, let us pray day in and day out.

And let us pray not because we have finally mastered it, and let us not pray because we finally found this untapped reserve of spiritual power in us.

Let us pray instead because we have the name of the Lord Jesus in which to pray.

Let us pray because in Him we have the full love and full access to the Father, from whom all good gifts come.

Let us pray because in this asking, this level of relationship with the Father, that this is where the joy is at.

To have Him.

Let us pray because this is the joy that Jesus came to give.

And in our asking, He promises to deliver the joy.

Amen.