How Much More, and He Is Comparing Him to Your Father

I asked a group once to describe, honestly, what God's face is doing at the moment they start to ask Him for something.

It was not a fair question and I knew it. But I wanted the instinctive answer rather than the correct one, so I gave them ten seconds and told them not to think.

Almost nobody said a warm thing. The most common answer was a kind of neutrality. Waiting. Assessing. A few said patient in a way that did not sound like a compliment. Two people said they pictured Him listening with His arms folded.

And then somebody said the thing that ended the exercise. She said: I think I picture somebody who is going to say yes eventually if I am reasonable about it.

That is a picture of a reluctant giver. Not a cruel one. A reasonable one, who can be brought round.

And almost none of us chose that picture. It arrived from somewhere and settled in, and it runs underneath every request a person makes without ever being examined.

The comparison He actually makes

Jesus teaches on prayer and then does something risky. He compares God to ordinary human parents, and He does it in the middle of a passage about asking.

If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? (Luke 11:11, King James Version)

Read the assumption in that question. He assumes the answer is obvious. He assumes that the people listening, who were ordinary people with ordinary families, would find the idea of handing a child a stone instead of bread absurd.

And then He draws the line out.

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? (Luke 11:13)

Being evil. He does not flatter anybody. And even granting that, He says the instinct to give a hungry child bread is so reliable in ordinary flawed people that it can be used as the lower end of a comparison.

How much more. That is the whole argument, and it runs upward from a normal parent to God.

You have been given a comparison that starts with ordinary people and runs upward, and it was made by Him rather than assembled by anybody hopeful, and Luke 11 puts the how much more on the end rather than the beginning. That work is the Spirit's, and He moves that from an idea into the moment a person actually asks.

Where the reluctant picture comes from

It is worth asking where it came from, because a person cannot examine a thing they cannot see.

Some of it is a father. That is not always the case and I am not going to assume it, but for a lot of people the working picture was formed early, by somebody who was not unkind and was hard to read, and God got the same face.

Some of it is teaching. A great deal of well meant preaching about persistence has left people with the impression that God has to be worn down, and that impression outlives the sermon by about thirty years.

And some of it is the honest experience of asking for something and not receiving it, which happens to everybody, and which the mind explains by assembling a picture of somebody who was not inclined to give.

You are not being blamed for a picture you did not build, and no verse anywhere treats an inherited impression as a sin (James 1:17), and the Holy Spirit is the one who repaints something like that slowly rather than demanding a person believe differently by Tuesday.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. (James 1:17)

No variableness. No shadow of turning. That is a statement about consistency, and it is aimed directly at the suspicion that His mood might be the deciding factor.

What the picture does to the asking

Here is why it matters practically rather than only being interesting.

A person who pictures a reluctant giver does not ask plainly. They build a case. They open with reasons. They explain why the request is legitimate and why they are not being greedy and how it would be used, and by the time they get to the actual sentence they are tired.

I have listened to people pray like that for years and it took me a long time to hear what it was. It is not reverence. It is advocacy, and advocacy is what a person does in front of somebody who might refuse.

And there is a second cost. A person who has to persuade eventually asks for less, because the effort of building a case is high and the small things are not worth the trouble.

You have not been assigned the job of persuading Him, and Romans says He that spared not His own Son will with Him freely give us all things (Romans 8:32). The same Spirit is the one who takes the advocacy out of a person's mouth and leaves the request.

Freely. That word is in there.

And notice the order of the sentence. The Son first, everything else after. Whatever else Paul is arguing, he is arguing from the largest thing already given to the smaller things still being asked about, which is the same direction Jesus was going in Luke.

You have already received the expensive thing, and everything you are asking about now sits downhill of it (Romans 8:32), and it is the Spirit who makes that arithmetic land on somebody who has been arguing for scraps.