My First Bible #17: Matthew 7:7

Folded between some other verses, I hadn't even realised I'd written this one down.  However, I'm not surprised - this is the verse that God used to bring me to him.  It's the verse with which I became a Christian.

For me, one of the first significant moments in my journey to faith was meeting someone for whom it was completely obviously that their faith was 'real' - as in, God was a real presence in their life - followed by the quick realisation that, for all my self-righteous desire to go to church and call myself a Christian, this wasn't my life.  The best way to express it then was that God was not in my life.  I'd argue now that that's technically not true from a theological point of view, but that would be splitting hairs.  I spent a good few months of agonising and longing and fearing, as I realised how very lost I was.

I'm not sure when I learnt that the words the hymn 'Seek ye First' (Karen Lafferty, 1971), of one of my secondary school's regular hymns, were from the Bible, but I had done so by the by the time I found myself in this state of lostness.  They go like this:

Ask and it shall be given unto you
Seek and you shall find
Knock and the door shall be opened unto you
Allelu alleluia

The catchy tune we'd repeated so many times had stuck in my head, so that when another person suggested I ask my guardian angel for help in my time of turmoil I was experiencing, I ignored the guardian angel part of the advice as I suddenly realised I needed to listen to words I known all along: ask, seek, knock, and you shall find.

If God is not in your life, ask him to be.

That night my life changed, and the rest is history.

It's such a simple instruction, and yet so often we (or at least, I) manage to forget it.  And yet in every time I have found myself in a time of doubting or lacking in spiritual fervour, when I pray that God would provide me some means of knowing his restoration and encouragement, it always comes.  Not straight away, but it always does.

Of course, there are at least two reasons (in my opinion fairly obvious reasons) why we don't always ask.  The first is a desire to do it ourselves.  This might be a conscious desire, or it might just be habit.  We have a habit of doing all the things we can do to control a situation ourselves before asking God (or indeed, anyone else) for help.  It might not even be that we dislike asking for help - sometimes we're just so distracted or in denial that we don't even realise we need it!

The second reason is that as long as we don't ask God for anything, he can't disappoint us with a failure to respond.  If we never test our faith that God will answer, we can continue to preach that he will.  It may be a little subconscious, but I'm sure all of us sometimes fear that God will fail.

But God has promised that he will not fail.  And even when our own situations look like a failure, God has shown us he will not fail by raising Jesus from the dead, defeating death and bringing the promised salvation.

Matthew 7:7 is a promise.  There are many times in life where I find myself lost, but in this verse Jesus promises that there will be a way through, a light at the end of the tunnel, provision for what is needed.  Sometimes we must sit tight and wait a little while, but, as he has promised, God will answer.

The summer I was 17 years old I read my Bible cover to cover for the first time.  I was captivated and completed the whole thing in 4 months.  Although I clearly read it at quite a pace, I still jotted down passages that sprang out to me in my still relatively new faith.  I still have that Bible, and the scraps of paper are still there, bookmarking each verse.  So I decided to go through, 18 years later, and visit each of them.  They are from the Good News Bible.