God will grant whatever I ask?

Hey, everyone. As you probably know, we are continuing our series in the upper room where Jesus meets with his disciples privately for the last time before his arrest, crucifixion, death and resurrection. And the text this last week and actually the text coming up this week both include these phrases of if you ask for anything in My name, it will be granted.

You’ll have whatever you ask for if you ask for it in My name. And so since we didn’t get to cover that in this last week, I want to circle back and address it now.

Of course, many people over millennia of church history have looked into this and wondered if this is some kind of little trick that we can use to get whatever we want from God.

It is not that. But the question is, what does it mean to pray in Jesus name and to get whatever we want? Praying in Jesus name is at least twofold meaning. One is we have the right to come before the Father and petition him because we are coming in Jesus name. We are coming with the credit that he has earned.

We can approach the throne with confidence not because we are there on our own merit, but because we are there on Christ’s merit. There’s a. There’s an old hymn from the 1700s, actually, that one of the lines is, thou art coming to a king. Large petitions with thee bring his power. And might are such.

One can never ask too much. And so we come before God and we can really be bold and ask for whatever that is coming with the credit that Jesus has earned, with the rights that Jesus has before going before the Father. But in terms of getting whatever you ask for asking in his name, we can think about if we are going somewhere on behalf of someone else.

So we’re an ambassador, maybe to another country. We are the one that’s physically present the other country, but we are there on behalf of our country.

Or perhaps a lawyer speaks on our behalf, or, you know, our representative speaks on our behalf. Any of those scenarios, the representative, the lawyer, the ambassador really only has authority to say what we would say. The one who they are representing. A lawyer can’t say anything that their client wouldn’t approve of.

If they’re coming in your name, they have to accurately represent you to whoever it is that they’re speaking to.

And so if we come in Jesus name to the Father, we are coming in the sense of we are representing his agenda, we are moving forward his plan. We are an ambassador for Him. We are standing up for what he is standing up for. Like we are licensed to say what he would say right and so in that sense of course, right, if we are representing Jesus agenda before the Father and we ask to move that forward then the answer is going to be yes, we’re going to have whatever we need in order to represent Jesus

to the world in the way that he would want to be represented. That answer will never be no.

We will absolutely have what we need, what he would want if he was the one speaking to that will be given granted 100% always, all the time. And so that’s what it means. We can come before God and ask really on behalf of Jesus what he would be asking for himself. It will be granted so we can go represent him, stand in his name in the world being an ambassador for him in the world.

So we’re glad we could circle back to that question since we didn’t have time to address it in our sermon this last week.

We’ll see you next time.