Are You Asking?

You do not have because you do not ask.

(James 4:2b NASB)

This week at work, our network connection was down for 24 hours. 

When a technician arrived and tested the line, he discovered that we had wonderful signal coming into the building, but no signal going out. In other words, the wealth of the Internet was available to us, but we had no way to ask for the information.

This struck me as a good example of what happens with prayer. We have all the vast resources of God's provision available to us, but we fail to ask. In Matthew 7:7 Jesus tells us to ask for what we need. The Greek word here is Αἰτεῖτε and occurs 70 times in the New Testament (Strong's Greek: 154) And guess what the word means... to ask. 

Why do we struggle to ask? Is it our pride, our ignorance or something else? Sometimes we hesitate to ask for something because a previous request was refused or even worse, ridiculed. But God is not like men. He may ask us to patiently wait but he never ignores our requests. He has our best interest at heart.

We ask Cortana, Google and Alexa for info or to do things for us. Some of you may remember the Internet search engine ask.com (it still exists). We ask a lot of ourselves and we ask that others conform even if we are not vocal about it. Why not stop and ask God for what you truly need. If you don't need anything, then ask him to show you what your real needs are.