The Art of Asking - Your Father Knows

Building a personal relationship with God by asking him for help in time of need.

One of the foundations of building a relationship is to ask questions. We gain information about the other through our questions and begin to compare that information with what we know about ourselves. When we feel that we know enough about the relationship, the questions tend to end if we stop pursuing or increase as we draw near. However, as we find ourselves in needs that we ourselves are unable to meet, we yearn for One who can meet those needs. But as mature adults should we ask for help?

When we were children, most of us constantly asked questions for help from our parents. Many times they would offer help in answer to our questions, but as they discovered that our questions were means of using them as our own personal servants, most of us were sent on our merry way with, “You can do that yourself. It’s time for you to grow up.” We discovered that we could do more on our own than we wanted to or thought we could. We could supply our own needs, and soon learned that we did not need anyone to help us.
Many of us carried the messages of self-reliance from middle and high school into college and beyond into careers and marriage. We tended only to ask for help when we are desperate or when the demands our needs are not being met. Yet, even by desperation or demand, we weren’t seeking to grow a relationship with the other, but rather relief from the anxiety of the need.

God is very relational. He is a relational Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. His own created heaven is filled with the noise of fellowship and the inter-relationship of angels, archangels, seraphs, and multitudes of creatures. He created our own heaven and earth to place plants, birds, and creatures of all sort and sizes for relationship with the creation. He created us, male and female, for fellowship with him.

So, when Jesus comments, “Your Father knows what your needs are before you ask him,” Jesus is describing a relationship between us and the Father. A number of us have had unkind, ungracious, ungenerous fathers and mothers, and the last thing that we will do is to ask one of them or now anyone for help in our time of need. Thus, Jesus highlights the nature of our relationship with the Father to break a cycle of our own resistance of asking for help. He knows our needs, and he is looking for a deeper and richer relationship than being our all-supplying, personal servant. The Father too wants to know and be known by us, and returns us to the foundation of relationship – asking questions. It’s easy for him to meet our needs, but he also knows that deep relationships are forged with questions. Ask a few. Watch how you’re quickly invited into the fullness of relationship with the Trinity.