Dearest Family,
Welcome back to all the women who attended the Women’s Retreat. Good reports and testimonies have ensued. On Sunday, in keeping with the men’s study theme this year of ‘sonship’, I was asked to speak on some aspect of ‘asking and sonship’. It was not a men’s meeting because ‘sonship’ is not a gender term in scripture but a dominant metaphor for our relationship to the Father as sons and daughters. C. S. Lewis, who had a tragically sad relationship with his own father, wrote: “When the Bible talks of ‘sons of God’ this brings us up against the very center of theology.” I might add that it brings us to the very center of our understanding of prayer, of asking, but sadly the relation between assurance of sonship (intimacy with God as Father) and the practice of prayer (asking of the Father) is rarely treated in books about God’s fathering. This is a significant oversight.
There are three fundamental truths that are the foundation of our asking. The first is that God hears our asking; the second is that He responds. Both of these attributes give “confidence” (1 John 5:14) to our asking. But there is a third, which is the most foundational one, which Jesus most emphasized in His teaching and exampled in His practice. To those who love God and are His sons and daughters by spiritual adoption, He is the Father. It is this familial and filial relationship and trust that essentially grounds and secures our confidence in asking. As P.T.Forsyth described it, “He (Jesus) made the all-knowing Fatherhood the ground of true prayer. We do not ask as beggars but as children.” Jesus taught that we were to ask in a child-like way of the Father. Bonhoeffer understood the relationship between these two truths. “The child learns to speak because the father speaks to him. He learns the speech of his father. So we learn to speak to God because God has spoken to us and speaks to us.” He understood that the reason we can ask in the first place, is because we have the speech of the Father, and when we ask, we are simply repeating the Father’s “own words after Him.” It is the most natural thing in the world for children to ask the Father. Jesus assumed this.
He said that if earthly fathers will give their sons what they ask, “How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Luke11:13). Every answer to every prayer is premised on God’s fatherhood – on his fatherly response to His sons and daughters.
When the disciples ask Jesus how they can ask in prayer, what are Jesus’ first two words? “Our Father.”
How did Jesus always ask? “Father, Lord of heaven and earth” (Matthew 11:25); “My Father if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me” (Matthew 26:39).
Following the raising of Lazarus, Jesus makes clear the ground of his assurance for His own asking: “Father I thank you that you have heard me” (John 11: 41).
If last words give any indication to what is of utmost importance, then we should note that in the Last Supper discourse, Jesus references the Father 44 times and 6 times in his ‘high priestly’ prayer: “I will ask the Father …” (John 14:16); “Father, the time has come” (John 17:1); “Do you think I cannot ask my Father for twelve legions of angels” (Matthew 26:53).
So when it came to asking, it is clear that the apostles got what Jesus taught: “Since you call on a Father” (1Peter 1:17); “We have an advocate with the Father” (1John 2:1). Paul got it: “I keep asking … the glorious Father … For this reason I kneel before the Father” (Ephesians 1:17; 3:14). Like Jesus, and like the apostles, our asking is related to our assurance of God’s fathering. But our asking does not begin in our relationship with Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but in their relationship with each other.
Do you see what all this means for our asking? It is not just some expression of our need initiated by us. The asking Godhead invites us to boldly ask. Our asking has been elevated, honored, and blessed. The Father invited the Son to ask him. The Son did. The Son now asks us to ask the Father. We do. They invite us to insert our asking into their communications with each other. They all get in on it, and they respond to it, and thereby we discover this relationship between asking and accessing. To ask is to access the Trinity no less. May 10, 2017 This also helps us understand what the main outcome of our asking is all about. It is not our particular answer, but as Jesus put it, “This is to my Father’s glory!” (John 15:8) John Piper comments: “The first function of prayer is to pray that people will pursue the glory of God.” Our asking is the great means to the glorification of God no less. “Ask and I will do whatever you ask in my name … so the Son may bring glory to the Father” (John 14:13). The more asking the more glory to God, not just from us but from Jesus Himself. Asking is a way we express our pursuit of His glory in all the earth. Was this not the entire point and purpose of Jesus’ asking in His last hours? “Father … glorify your son that your son may glorify you.” In a theology of asking it is the fatherhood of God, and consequently our assured sonship, that is the premise for all assurance about the naturalness, the necessity, the appropriateness, the liberty, the expectation, the confidence of asking. The only limit on our asking is the limitation of our relationship with the Father.
The evidence of the New Testament is theologically conclusive and therefore persuasive about this. Asking of ‘the Father’ is the essential expression of prayer. The fatherhood of God is the underpinning of the apostles’ theology of asking. Just before he tells us that it is the Spirit who helps us when we do not know what we should ask for, Paul tells us that the most instinctive cry of the Spirit of sonship through us is “Abba, Father!” (Romans 8:15,26) Asking is the response of a son to the Father. It is what sons do all the time. The Apostle James understood that everything we ask for, including wisdom and every good and perfect gift, comes from the Father, the God he exhorts us to ask. (James 1: 5,17). Peter understands that we “call on a Father” (1 Peter 1:17) The object of all asking and the consequent source of all answering is the Father. This was the bedrock conviction of the early church as it asked of God from the very beginning, when their asking of the Father in the upper room, imitative of Jesus’ asking of the same Father for the same thing, received that commonly desired answer of the Father, the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Any weakening of our sense of sonship, anything that subverts our assurance of His fatherhood and fathering, will be a weakening in our confidence to ask, or a redirecting of our asking from Father to other sources. There are many who will religiously acknowledge the Fatherhood of God in a creational or creedal sense, but do not know God in a personal fathering sense, not because God is an absent uninvolved father, but because they have such distortions of fatherhood through injurious parental experience; or because, though spiritual sons and daughters, they are actually living as orphans or slaves in the Father’s house.
I went on to look at how and why the orphan or slave spirit is so destructive of asking. I urge you to download the message and understand these important observations, if not for your own prayer life, for helping others to whom you minister.
The bondages I talked about gag the asking. When there is a fracture in our assurance of our relationship with the Father, for whatever reason, and when we are tempted to live as a slave or orphan instead of a son, the external conflicts with circumstance and the internal conflicts with self, will eliminate our asking. You do not ask of a source you have chosen not to trust. Anger and pride, hostility and hopelessness, fear and resignation, do not ask. But it is because we are sons and daughters that we are free to ask of the Father. That God is our Father is the glorious truth that validates our asking; that nurtures and us as we wait in the answer-gap for the responses to our asking. What above all things assures our asking, and anchors our theology of asking? In the words of Jesus: “Father, I thank you that you have heard me” (John11:41). Jesus’ Father heard and responded to His Son. He will respond to you too, dear son and daughter of His. Begin asking with the same words Jesus used: “My Father!”
Your asking-brother (because we have the same Father),
Stuart
