Sermons
August 2, 2026 (Proper 13)
Eat Dirt
Matthew 7:7-11
Fred Craddock once visited a church’s prayer group. While he was there, he saw the group’s little book where they kept record of the things they had prayed for. If a request was granted, they would make a note of the date on which it happened.
Fred looked at the things the group had asked for, and was sort of flabbergasted: luxury cars, furs, dates, that sort of thing. And he wondered, “Is that what prayer is for?”
There are certainly some who have said it is. They would say that, yes, when you ask God for something with enough faith, God is honor-bound to give it to you. They would base that idea on today’s passage from the Sermon on the Mount, and on John 15:7, which says, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”
Well, that’s a pretty big “if,” isn’t it? And that big “if” brings us back to today’s passage, and its threefold language describing prayer.
“Ask…seek…knock.” “Ask” is obvious: when we pray, a lot of the time we are asking for something. That’s what the prayer group Fred encountered did. They asked for luxury cars and furs and such, and they kept a record of when they received those things.
But then there’s Paul, who describes in 2 Corinthians 12 how he asked God repeatedly to take away his “thorn in the flesh,” whatever it might have been, perhaps because it was keeping him from being as effective in ministry as he thought he could be. It’s not a case of “unanswered prayer.”
A lot of the times when we use that phrase, we’re talking about God just leaving our prayers on “read.” What happened to Paul wasn’t that God failed to answer his repeated prayers for relief. God did answer: the answer was “no.”
“Ask, and it will be given you…for everyone who asks receives”? Really?
Well, let’s go on to the second word for prayer in this passage: “search,” or in some versions, “seek.” What are we searching for? And how does that search relate to the question of whether we actually receive from God what we ask for?
All three of these terms are straight out of Jewish tradition. They do have slightly different shades of meaning, but we aren’t to assume that “asking” is a beginner’s form of prayer, while “searching” is more intermediate, and “knock” means we’ve really arrived as a pray-er. Instead, I think they all work together, especially the first two, which is how we might resolve the question of whether God really does answer prayer, or whether we do actually receive when we ask.
Maybe the first thing we should notice is that it doesn’t actually say, “Ask, and you will receive what you ask for.”
Jesus never says—and it never says anywhere else in the Bible—that God is somehow required to give us whatever we ask for, like a giant vending machine in the sky, where we insert a prayer and push a button, and out pops exactly what we want.
In light of verse 11, maybe “it will be given you” means “God will give what is good for you, even if it’s not exactly what you’ve asked for.” And “seeking” or “searching” might be a way for us to get better at asking for the right things.
In Jewish tradition, “seeking” means searching for God’s will. As we search for God’s will, we will find it; and as we bring our lives more and more into line with God’s will, then we may find that we receive what we ask—because what we’re asking for is close to what God’s will for us is.
But that brings us back to the question of why we don’t always get what we ask for.
Remember how Paul asked God to remove the “thorn” in his flesh—we don’t know exactly what that was, but it could have been some kind of chronic illness or disability—and God said no. Paul had to have been asking because he believed the condition, whatever it was, kept him from being as effective in his ministry as he might have been. How could it not have been God’s will for Paul to be at his best as he sought to serve God?
But God said no, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Why would God not give Paul what he asked for?
Well, because when Paul was not healed, when he still suffered with whatever it was that plagued him, he had something even greater than his own strength to rely on: God’s own power, so much greater than even Paul’s at his most vigorous, most healthy. So Paul asked, and he did receive—he received something better than what he asked for.