Month: August 2026

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Ask, Seek, Knock

I have been privileged to pray with Christians in other countries in a variety of settings. In the Czech Republic I stood with worshippers who prayed with hands folded for an extended time as one person after another led in spontaneous prayer. I witnessed the praying of hundreds of South Korean Christians who gathered at five o’clock in the morning to pray for their nation. They prayed aloud, in unison, a great chorus of intercession. It was my privilege to gather with thousands of Ethiopian believers who met on a mountaintop for an annual prayer retreat. They were there to pray for revival and the spread of the gospel in their nation.

These believers took seriously the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:7-11, when he told his disciples, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.” This is an audacious promise. We are tempted to hesitate, to equivocate, to doubt. After all, we are small and insignificant. God is great, and he has a universe to run!

But our Lord Jesus is repeating a direct command: “Ask, seek, knock.” He goes on to say that every Christian may pray this way, boldly and confidently, whether they live in Europe, Asia, or Africa. I hope my American brothers and sisters are praying as fervently and as passionately for our nation as the believers I observed overseas were praying for theirs.

To illustrate this, the Lord asks us to imagine a child coming to a parent with a request for something to eat. Earthly fathers and mothers, even though they are not perfect people, know how to give good things to their children. If this is true, how much more will our heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him in faith? He wants us to come to him with our needs.

Someone might raise the objection that prayer is unnecessary because God already knows what we need. There is an obvious answer to this. Our praying is not to inform God, or to overcome his reluctance. He wants us to pray because it is a way of acknowledging our dependence on him and our devotion to him.

Another possible objection is that prayer does not always work! God does not always give us what we ask for. “I prayed for a job, and I am still unemployed.” “I prayed for healing, and I am still sick.” The best way to think about this is that God is not a cosmic vending machine. We must come to him on his terms. He may say “no” to a prayer of ours because he has a higher purpose than we can see at first. We can be as thankful for unanswered prayers as for answered prayers.

There are examples in the Bible of famous believers who prayed and did not receive what they asked for. Abraham prayed for the city of Sodom to be spared, but God destroyed it anyway. King David prayed for his baby to live. The child died. The apostle Paul prayed repeatedly for his “thorn in the flesh” (possibly a physical affliction) to be removed, but the Lord said “no.” God had something else in mind. Paul was to learn humility and to rely on God’s grace.

The fact is, our human understanding is so limited, we do not always have the wisdom to know what is best for us (Romans 8:26). If God gave us everything we asked for, that would be a terrible burden to bear. We would be left to our own limited understanding (Proverbs 3:5-6). The best way to pray is the way Jesus prayed: “Your will be done,” the prayer that never fails.

Jesus’ encouragement to us in Matthew 7 is to pray boldly, persistently, with faith, bringing our desires to the Father. His “ask, seek, knock” is a reminder that the Father welcomes our prayers. He is a good Father. He gives only good gifts to his children.

Pastor Randy Faulkner

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Don’t Give Up

A Sunday School teacher was getting discouraged. She went to her pastor and asked to be relieved of her class. “I’m not doing any good,” she said. She told her pastor that she was not seeing any spiritual response in the lives of the young people in her class.

This was during the second world war. Not long after that, she received a letter from a soldier in the U.S. army. He was writing to thank her for being his Sunday School teacher. “Because of you,” he wrote, “I am a Christian. This fact gives me hope and courage in this war. Your life has been a blessing to me.” After she read that letter, she went back to her pastor and asked to be reassigned to her ministry of teaching young people the Bible.

We do not always recognize the good that we are doing as we serve the Lord. He is the one who is keeping the records in heaven. Sometimes he lets us see what our works for him are accomplishing.

If we are tempted to become discouraged and to give up, it is a good idea to remember the promise in Galatians 6:9, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Most people know who it was who invented the lightbulb. He was Thomas Alva Edison, a self-taught grade school dropout whose inventions revolutionized the American economy. But before he became famous as an inventor and entrepreneur, he had failed many times in business. His laboratory burned down. He was faced with bankruptcy. His wife died at a young age. But Edison did not give up.

He is known for his optimism and persistence. Over a period of sixty years he applied for 1,093 U.S. patents. He is probably America’s most famous inventor. His creations were the result of repeated experiments that led to new ways of looking at problems. Sometimes they led to new inventions and sometimes they did not. For every one of his successes, there were far more failures. When he was asked about this, he replied, “I have not failed ten thousand times. I have successfully found ten thousand ways that will not work.”

Edison’s example is a good reminder that as we serve the Lord, faithfulness is the secret to usefulness. It is always too soon to quit. Paul put it this way in 1 Corinthians 15:58, “Your labor for the Lord is not in vain.”

Pastor Randy Faulkner

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The Gift of Time

For many years it was my practice to meet with men for training in Christian discipleship. Once after an early morning meeting one of the men lingered to talk. Over a last cup of coffee he looked across the table and asked, “Why do you take time for this?” He was a successful businessman. I tried to answer in terms he would understand.

“People are God’s priority,” I said. “I am interested in developing men who will be men of influence for God. I am willing to take time to meet with faithful men who will use their influence to help others know and follow Jesus Christ.”

As I answered I had in mind Paul’s words to his young disciple Timothy: “The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Timothy 2:2).

The apostle was challenging his younger protege to take the spiritual teachings and practices he had learned from him, and re-invest them in others, who could, in turn, pass them on to still others.

I told that businessman that God wanted to use him as a leader in his family, in the church, and in the community. I saw in him the ability to influence others and I hoped he would use those leadership gifts for Christ. He had proven to be a faithful man. He had accepted my invitation to meet for Bible study, to keep a daily appointment with God in the scripture and prayer, to memorize Bible verses, and to learn to be an effective witness. “If I find a man like that,” I said, “it is worth the investment of time for me to meet with him and to encourage him.”

We give our time to what is important to us. If our marriages are important to us, we will give the gift of time to our spouses, pursuing loving relationships and serving them. If our children are important to us, we will not be absent from their lives as they are growing up. If our churches are important to us, we will love the people of the church enough to share life with them, to worship and study with them, and to pray with them.

If Christian discipleship is important to us, then we will want to be faithful disciples of Jesus. And we will want to follow his command to make disciples for him. I have never doubted this investment of time is worthwhile.

It is strategically important. If the future health and strength of the church is important, then it is a good idea to take the time to develop the church’s future leaders. I have found that younger men respond well to this challenge. Their habits of life are still being formed. They want to be good leaders.

This was the method of Jesus. He spent three years with his disciples, teaching them, modeling before them, empowering them, and sending them out to minister in his name. Yes, Jesus preached to large crowds. We know he was concerned about the masses of people. But he spent most of his time developing the few, the seventy, the twelve, and his inner circle, Peter, James, and John.

Time is a precious commodity that we give to what is important to us. Investing time in a small group of fellow believers who are potential leaders is a good way to accomplish God’s priorities. The payoff is spiritual reproduction.

Pastor Randy Faulkner

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If God Is Good . . . Why?

Churches are regularly presented with requests to pray for individuals who face life-threatening circumstances. Church people are usually faithful to pray for their friends who are suffering. They hear about lingering sicknesses, major surgeries, injuries caused by accidents and other tragedies.

Sometimes folks are tempted to ask the question “why?” Why is this happening? Not every Christian asks that question the same way or with the same urgency. But I suspect there are times when all believers ponder the question of undeserved suffering.

The question is often framed this way: if God is good, and if he is all-powerful, why does he allow suffering and evil to continue? Admittedly, it takes faith to affirm the goodness and power of God when we are confronted with the enormity of evil and human suffering. It does no good to deny the reality of evil. And we know that it is un-Christian to deny the goodness and power of God. Is there an answer to this conundrum?

Thomas Oden has offered some constructive thoughts about this vexing issue. I have found them helpful to my own understanding. The following propositions are adapted from his writings.

  1. God does not directly will human suffering. He does not cause it. He himself is good. But we live in a world that has been corrupted and polluted by sin, and sin has consequences.
  2. This is not to say that every instance of suffering is a direct consequence of a victim’s personal sin. In fact, Jesus explicitly refuted this idea when he said of the man born blind that neither his nor his parent’s sins had caused his blindness (John 9:1-3).
  3. God suffers with his people. He feels our suffering. He entered our world of pain in the person of Jesus Christ who was “despised and rejected by mankind, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering” (Isaiah 53:3). Jesus was “tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).
  4. God gave human beings the gift of freedom of choice. They have consciousness, intelligence, conscience, and will. In doing this God was willing to risk the possibility that human beings would abuse their freedom and choose to disobey him. If God had taken away the power of choice, he would have removed human intelligence and moral accountability.
  5. God in his wisdom decided to create a universe in which evil and suffering were a possibility. Had he not done that, there would be no possibility of freedom.
  6. God’s power can draw good out of evil. Adam fell, but that occasioned the greater redemption through Christ. Many biblical examples show how God brought good out of evil (the sufferings of Job, the Babylonian captivity, Paul’s thorn in the flesh). This does not mean that suffering is good in itself. It means that God is able to use it to accomplish his good purpose (Romans 8:28). Oden wrote, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit evil to exist.”
  7. Sometimes suffering occurs because we are connected to the rest of humanity. No one is an island. Paul repeated the maxim that “no one lives to himself.” Therefore, what happened to Adam (sin and death) happened to me. What happens to society happens to me,  Some sufferings are the result of social evils (crime, war, terrorism) or human mistakes (faulty construction, drunken drivers) or natural disasters (earthquakes, storms, contagious diseases).
  8. We grow through trials and suffering, even though we do not like it. Every athlete knows there is no growth and development without pain. Again, God does not cause our suffering, but he may use it for our sanctification. This does not diminish the pain, but it may help us see God’s good purpose in it.
  9. Evil does not limit God’s power. It will not win. Beyond human history, God will renew creation, judge evil and set right what has been ruined by sin.

As I think about these affirmations, I wonder if, instead of asking “why?” I should be asking “how?” How may I respond to my difficulties with faith and courage? How may I see God’s good purpose in my suffering? How may I use these troubles to grow more like Jesus Christ?

Pastor Randy Faulkner