You Receive Not Because You Ask Not: The Parable of the Prodigal Son – Luke 15:11-32
I see this brother as most of us Christians who work really hard for the Lord, serving Him in different ways
I am sure most of you are like me who has heard and read this parable of the prodigal son countless times. I have always heard this parable from the angle of a son who was once lost but came back to the Father, but today I want to touch on a different perspective and that’s the perspective of the prodigal son’s brother who always worked for his father and never at any time transgressed him. I see this brother as most of us Christians who work really hard for the Lord, serving Him in different ways and expect Him to give us what we desire as a token of appreciation for our faithfulness to Him. We often feel let down when we don’t receive what we were expecting from God and we even reach a point of quitting things of the Lord; especially when we see our friends getting what we have been expecting for years.
No matter how hard we work for the Lord, if we need something from Him we have to ask.
Sometimes we have a “hyper-faith” that contradicts the Word of God. A “hyper-faith” that expects us to receive things from God even without asking. No matter how hard we work for the Lord, if we need something from Him we have to ask. We can never receive from God if we do not ask. This brother in Luke 15 always worked hard for his father but His only problem was that he never asked for anything from him. He had the faith that since he was always pleasing his father then he would receive what he craved for without even asking for it and that`s exactly how most of us think like. Despite having faith we still have to do something and that is ask. If we do not ask from the Lord, then we should never expect to receive the desires of our heart from Him. As we are serving the Lord let us also remember to ask for the desires of our heart and the Lord shall give them to us. In Philippians 4:6, the Bible tells us not to be anxious about anything but in prayer and “petition” we have to present our requests to God. This verse does not say that we need not to be anxious about anything but by faith let us present our requests to God, not at all! It is only through prayer and petition that we make our requests known to God and not by faith. Faith comes later after we present our requests to the Father, it does not exempt prayer and petition. Faith is like water that is applied after sowing a seed to allow the seed grow. We do not apply water on a ground we never sowed anything into and expect to reap corn afterward. We plant (present our requests to God by prayer) and then water (have faith) as we are waiting the seed to grow. Faith and prayer go hand in hand, nothing is powerful in solitude. Shalom
