The Holy Spirit Given

How much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?

We would rather submit a list.

I would. I want prayer to work like an order form, and this verse quietly declines. Luke reports the same saying Matthew does with one difference at the end, and the difference changes everything: where Matthew has good things, Luke has the Holy Spirit. Same argument, same fathers and bread and fish, and the good gift at the end of it turns out to be a person rather than an outcome.

Look at what Luke has built around it, because the whole section is about asking. It opens with the disciples asking to be taught to pray. Then the friend who comes at midnight and gets his bread not because of friendship but because of importunity, which is a word for shameless persistence. Then ask, seek, knock. Then the ordinary fathers who do not hand a hungry child a stone. And at the end of that run, what is actually on offer is God himself, in you.

Which is where our praying gets exposed, mine as much as anybody's. We ask for the outcome and mean every word, and we would be quietly disappointed to be handed the Spirit instead. That tells us something about what we believe we are short of.

Father, I have been asking for outcomes and calling it prayer. Give me the Holy Spirit; I am asking in the plain words your Son put in my mouth, and I am admitting I would have preferred the other list. Do not give me what I asked for if it would leave me without you. And when the request I have repeated for months comes up in my mouth again today, change its shape while I am still saying it. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 224 is I Believe God (Acts 27:25).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna