A Journey of Prayer - In Jesus Name

“The Father Loves You”

(John 16:23-28, Preaching: Pastor Stephen Magee, January 24, 2010)

John 16:23-28 ²³ In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. ²⁴ Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full. ²⁵ I have said these things to you in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures of speech but will tell you plainly about the Father. ²⁶ In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; ²⁷ for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God. ²⁸ I came from the Father and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.

Q: What is the Lord’s encouragement to us concerning prayer? A: “Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” (John 16:24)

Ask the Father in My Name (23-24)

There is something about the resurrection of our Lord after only three days that can give us hope that things can change for the better in just a little while. This positive realism is a great gift to us from God, helpful in walking through the honest difficulties of any one day. The idea that we are allowed to borrow joy from eternity through the gift of hope, hope that makes today remarkably easier, is one of the tremendous blessings of God for His people. We have been granted, through the speedy resurrection of Christ, a true sense that our trouble may only be for a season. This may account for many passages in the New Testament that speak about all the goodness of eternity being very near. Listen to this one from Hebrews 10:37-39:

Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay; but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.” But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.

What do we do with this faith that we have? One of the things that we are told to do during the little while of our own days of affliction is to pray. This is something that many of us find very challenging, especially when it seems like it is not working. Our frustration with prayer is not a surprise to God. He plainly knows that many people who believe in Him will find it hard to speak to Him. He also knows that when we do speak to Him, it may seem to us that we do not get what we have asked for. That’s why He says through the Holy Spirit in James 4:2-3, “You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” That’s worth thinking about. From John 16 we learn something else about prayer, that though we may find it difficult to talk to God, and though we may have not received something that we asked for, the Father loves us, and He will give us what we ask for if we ask Him in Jesus’ name.

This asking in Jesus’ name, what does it mean? It cannot be just a magic phrase that we add to the end of every request. Part of the answer is that Jesus is the one-and-only divine Son of God, now made man, and it is through Him that our safe and bold access to the Father has been granted. Through His life and death something has happened for us. Jesus takes our prayers, He perfects them, and He offers them up to the Father. But praying in the name of Jesus must also have something to do with the will of God. When Jesus prayed on one important occasion, you may remember that He said, “Not My will, but Yours, be done.” When He taught His disciples to pray, He taught them to seek the Father’s will before they asked for their daily bread. (See also 1 John 5:13-15)

Talking to someone is about relationship. When we talk to our Father in heaven we bring the speech of a very limited creature to the only wise, loving, and powerful Creator. We should expect that the pathway to receiving from God and experiencing the fullness of joy from Him must ultimately be more about His will than our will. Could the work of prayer be something of a struggle of love, where our will is conformed to His will, and we are increasingly happy to receive what God wants for us? This is a journey of relationship where we bring our words and our hearts to God, and He changes them, so that what started out as our request in our own name, becomes something that is truly in Jesus’ name, pleasing to the will of our heavenly Father.

This perspective of a relationship where our prayers are perfected can give us a new willingness to come to God again with the excitement that He will take what we think we want, and He will use that as a starting point to give us something He has for us, perhaps in just a little while. That should be our expectation. He will give us something better than what we know enough to ask for, but He will do it in such a way that we eventually yield our will to His, and we find ourselves asking Him for the things that we have found to be better requests. The groans that come out of our mouths eventually end up being an expression of God’s own deep desires for us. This is prayer.

Figures of Speech and Plain Speaking (25)

What does God want for us? Jesus is speaking the words of John 16 at the turning of the ages. The Old Covenant life of living under all the Law of Moses is almost complete. Jesus has come as the Messiah. He is about to show the full extent of His own love for us and the Father’s love for us in His death on the cross. As the Old Covenant age is ending and the New Covenant age is about to begin, Jesus says that He has been speaking “in figures of speech, but that the hour is coming when I will tell you plainly about the Father.” Before He says these words, He is talking to His disciples about prayer, and after verse 25, He returns to that same topic of asking the Father in prayer. In between He mentions that His figures of speech will give way to plain speaking about the Father. Is there something to this plain speaking about the Father that may actually be a good prayer request for us?

It does seem that this is one important thing that God leads us to desire. It takes time for us to decide that knowing the Father is more important than anything else that we could ask for. Knowing the Father has something to do with seeing the Son, since Jesus is the visible representation of the Father. To strive to know Jesus, and through Him to be prepared for the future is a great thing to ask of God. Listen to the yearning of Paul for this great blessing.

Philippians 3:8-15 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord… ¹⁰ that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. ¹² Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. ¹³ Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. ¹⁵ Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.

Remember it was this same Apostle who had to take a little while on one occasion to have his prayer for healing in His body changed to “Your grace is sufficient for me.… Make your power perfect in my weakness,” so that he eventually was able to say, “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” He did not start by boasting gladly in his weakness, but that is where he eventually ended up, and that was apparently a prayer in Jesus’ Name. To know God more plainly is a wonderful thing for us to desire, even if we start by asking the Lord to take away the thorn in the flesh. And let’s remember that Paul does not have that thorn in His flesh today. That was just for a little while after all, and there was a purpose in it. God’s knows these things.

Because you have loved Me and believed… (26-28)

Now back to prayer again in the final verses of the passage. We have covered most of this already, today and in earlier passages in this gospel. Jesus, the eternal Son of God, came from the Father. He came into the world to do what only He could do. Now He is leaving the world and going to the Father. The New Covenant age is beginning. We will have Him as our Advocate at the right hand of the Father, and we are to make our requests known to the Father in Jesus’ name. But He seems to want us to have a new awareness of this point: The Father Himself loves us. Yes, Jesus turned the wrath of God away from us, but that wrath existed together with the love of the Father long before we were born. The solution of the cross flowed from the eternal love of the Father for His people, and it also satisfied the just demands of His holiness. The holiness and love of God embrace at the cross.

What you need to see at this moment is just how deep the love of the Father is for you. That can spur you on in all kinds of prayer, but just to know the love of God more deeply is an excellent prayer request. Jesus says here, “The Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.” We still wonder why it is that we don’t get everything that we ask, at least not right away. Of course, if our young children ever ask us why it is that they don’t get everything they want when they want it, we probably have an answer to that question, and it probably is not such a bad answer, yet we may decide that they are not ready to hear all of that answer at that moment, so we may say, “Because I said so.” That’s not all bad either, though it would not hurt to add, “and by the way, I do love you, even though I can’t give you what you want right now.”

I want to develop that thought of parent and child for a moment, since Jesus is telling us here about the Father’s love, and there must be something in this that we are supposed to understand. My guess is that childhood should be overwhelmingly positive, but I know that everyone has to experience some light affliction as you grow up in order to have a mature life as an adult, and God knows that. Discipline is a part of His fatherhood, and so we don’t get everything right away, and that’s His love for us too. Our affliction spurs us on in prayer, which when combined with the Scriptures enables us to know God. Ask and you will receive? Yes, but what will you receive? Will you always receive what you thought was best at first? If you do, it may take a little time depending on what you ask for. But while you wait, you can receive something even better if you are willing to keep coming to the Lord, something that may take a few years to appreciate. And with his gift of godly insight, you may also receive joy, and one day fullness of joy, and even pleasures forevermore in the eternal presence of God (Psalm 16).

When all else fails, and you have a prayer meltdown, and you don’t know what to say to God, ask the petitions of the Lord's prayer, and keep loving Jesus, and keep trusting that He has come from the Father. Trust that He came into the world for a purpose and that His purpose has something very specifically to do with you. Trust that He is with the Father now, and that His going to the Father had a purpose, a purpose that, once again, has something very particularly and definitively to do with you. And through it all, know this, that the Father Himself loves you.

1. What does it really mean to ask for things in Jesus’ name?

2. Will we always receive exactly what we ask for in the way that we expect to receive it without any restriction?

3. What are our requests of God? Do we want to understand Him and know Him plainly?

4. Have we imagined that Jesus loves us, but that the Father does not love us?