Matthew 7:11 NIV
If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
Luke 11:13
If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!
There is a lot packed into these verses. They are used all the time by the health and wealth preachers and they are very effective at attracting people and growing mega-churches. After all, they are the perfect verse to supplement the American Dream mindset we have.
The American dream is the idea that no matter what social class or ethnicity you are, you can raise yourself to a better/higher position in life. The key component to the American Dream is YOU. It is all about us. We are the center of the American dream – our dreams, our ambitions, our goals, our works, our pride, our confidence.
These verses show us though that we are truly able to do nothing without Jesus Christ our Savior. We are essentially evil at the core. The main cause for evil is our selfishness and our ambition to be gods of our own lives and control our destiny – sounds a lot like the American Dream?!
God sent his Son Jesus Christ to die on the cross for our sins so that He would be glorified. There is nothing we can ever do to pay for our sins and our evil nature. It is all about what He has done for us!
We exist to to bring glory our Creator and share the good news about what he has done with the nations..
Many people interpret these verses as a genie-in-a-bottle solution to all our problems – ask and you shall recieve. The gift we recieve though is not a cure if we are sick, or money if we are late on rent. The gift we recieve is that of the Holy Spirit. Luke 11:13 explicitly says this.
We should rejoice in the gift of the Holy Spirit that is given to us when we ask. We should continue to pray and listen to our promptings from the Holy Spirit who can guide and comfort us in our time of need.
This is very difficult to do if you are living in America. We want everything now and due to our conditioning and prosperity most of us do not take the time to wait on God, or his promptings from the Holy Spirit, because we have the resources to make the the things we want to happen happen when we want them to.
When we can count on ourselves to get the job done, why wait on God?
God’s plan is better and he can see the end game. God does not just want partial obedience from us, He wants total obedience. Most of us just put God in a box though and bring Him out when things are not going our way. You know when we have gone our own way on our own strength and something has finally gone wrong.
I encourage you though to be patient and truly submit to God’s direction and the promptings of the Holy Spirit which is the incredible gift he has for us. We have the best gift ever, but rarely do we take the time to follow it.
I challenge you to submit 100% to God’s guidance this next week and really listen to what he is telling you. This will be hard, because we already know what we want! However, the plans God has for us are so much bigger if we will just submit!