We Want
As infants, it was natural to us; as toddlers, we broadened its application: “We want what we want when we want it. Perhaps this drive never fades completely. Our survival mechanisms push us to stay tenacious about getting our way and acquiring what we think we need.
It even works its way into our spiritual philosophy. It is not sound theology, but we sometimes see God as the holy Bellhop. We ring, and God gets us what we need if we learn how to ask for it correctly. Do you remember: O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? It was Janis Joplin and her musicians that pulled the song together. There was some initial inspiration, a single phrase, from fellow songwriter Mike McClure. The song lent some good political and social satire, even if the theology is atrocious. God is not the supplier of cars, TVs, or nights-on-the-town. This neediness is deep in us. Our prayers include asking for what we want and waiting for God to come through.
We come by it naturally: it is how we are built, plus shows up in religious thought. Even our gospel lesson this Sunday points us in a similar direction as you can see below:
"So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luke 11:9-13)
Stepping back from the passage we can conclude generally that God knows what good things we need, and we are encouraged to name our desires as requests to God. We are to ask, seek and knock. Still, the thing that is received, that which is found, that which opens for us is left a little ambiguous in the teaching. The concluding promise is that the Father will surely grant the Holy Spirit to those who ask. I am not suggesting that this is a case of bate and switch, but the heavenly Father knows what we need, so it will probably not be that night-on-the-town, the TV, or the Mercedes Benz that is delivered. You know it, I know it and Janis Joplin even knew it all those decades ago.
We find some intriguing guidance in the Epistle of James:
You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly to spend what you get on your pleasures. …Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, “God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives all the more grace: therefore it says, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves therefore to God. (James 4:3-7a)
I have a sense that it is in the spirit of friendship with God that we learn to trust God in our requests from God. We, over time, are formed in such a way that we ask for the right things, in the right way. We receive what God knows to be rightfully underneath the thing for which we ask. Our knocking, searching, and asking comes into alignment with the Spirit of God.
One more element to this topic. We learn from the First Epistle of John:
And this is the boldness we have in the Son of God, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have obtained the requests made of him. …And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. (1 John 5:1-14-15, 20)
Sure, we want what we want when we want it. It is a lingering human tendency. But we are in a formation process. Spending time with these passages and we find that the topic is about making requests of God in the context of a growing relationship with God, in which more and more we conform with the divine will. Seek and desire God; within that dynamic context ask, search, and knock. The heavenly Father will certainly give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!