Asking God for Help
Jesus teaches His people to pray, “Give us today the food we need.”
When He says this, He tells us two important things about God our Father and the way He wants to relate to us.
First, God wants to meet our needs.
God is our loving Father. Jesus teaches us that when we pray, He is ready and willing to give us the good things that we ask for. He reminds us that when children ask their earthly fathers for good things, like food, their fathers give them what they ask for. Jesus reminds us that God loves us perfectly–better than any earthly father ever could–so how much more is our Father God going to give us what we need. (Matthew 7:11)
But God doesn’t just happen to meet our needs, and He doesn’t do it out of obligation. He actually wants to do it.
Luke 12:32 - It makes God happy to meet our needs
Jesus says in Luke 12:32, “Don’t be afraid little flock. For it gives your Father great happiness to give you the Kingdom.” What is He talking about when He says, “the Kingdom?” He’s talking about all the blessings that come when God’s will and God’s reign are brought to fullness on earth.
Read More: What does it mean to pray Your Kingdom Come?
This is everything that we were meant to experience brought to fullness. It’s life without sin’s destructive effects. We will only fully experience this life through a relationship with Jesus and at the end of all things when God makes everything new. God has given us access to the Kingdom by Jesus’s sacrifice when we believe in Him and put our faith and our hope in Him.
But notice Jesus says something else. He doesn’t just say, ‘Your Father has given you the Kingdom,’ although that would have been enough. Jesus says, “It gives your Father great happiness to give you the Kingdom.” This is a critical part of our understanding. God is not begrudgingly giving us access to His Kingdom. This is His joy. He wants to have a relationship with us, and He wants to share the fullness of life with us that He had planned before the foundation of the world.
Romans 8:32 - The God Who Gives Us the Kingdom Will Happily Give Us Everything Else
The Bible reminds us in Romans 8:32 that we can trust our Father, Who “did not spare even his own Son [Jesus] but gave Him up for us all.” This is the ultimate example of love. In fact, John 15:13 says, “there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” God showed us the ultimate example of love–the giving of His Son Jesus. And Jesus did the same by laying down His own life for us.
Romans 8:32 goes on and says that if God has loved us enough to give us His Son, “won’t he also give us everything else?” The question is rhetorical, and we can understand His meaning–God has already given us the most costly gift imaginable. Since we’ve seen this infinite generosity of God, how could we expect Him to be any less generous with us when we come to Him asking for our daily needs to be met.
The second thing we see from Jesus’s instruction to pray, “give us today the food we need” is that God wants us to keep coming back to Him.
God wants to keep helping us
There are times when we feel guilty for coming to God with our problems. We feel like there are other things we should be praying about instead. Maybe we even feel like God has bigger things to deal with than our little issues. The reality, however, is that God actually asks us to ask Him for help. God wants to help us.
Beyond just wanting to help us, God wants to keep helping us. He wants to meet today’s needs. He wants to meet tomorrow’s needs. He wants to meet the next day’s needs. Jesus says don’t worry about tomorrow because each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:34) God will provide for each day’s needs as they arise; we don’t have to worry about them. God’s mercy and grace are new every morning no matter what the day brings. (Lamentations 3:22-23)
God wants a relationship with us
Throughout the Bible, God shows us that He is in headlong pursuit of a relationship with us. He wants to be closer and closer to us. Here, when Jesus tells us to pray, “give us today the food we need,” we see God’s desire for relationship emphasized again. Jesus not only expects us to have to keep coming back to Him for help, and He not only wants us to ask Him when we need help, but He wants that to be a daily part of our prayers. In other words, God is not going to grow tired of our requests. Instead, God loves it when we come to Him and ask Him for what we need.
In Luke 18, Jesus tells a parable of a widow who comes to an unrighteous judge and asks for help. At first, the judge has no interest in helping, but the woman keeps coming back and asking again and again for her needs to be met. Finally, this unrighteous judge relents just so he can have relief from the woman’s constant requests.
Jesus draws an interesting comparison here. He says we who pray should pray like this widow. We know that we don’t pray to an unrighteous judge–God is the One Who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23). So if even an unrighteous judge will grant the request of this widow, how much more will our perfectly loving God grant our requests when we cry out to Him. Jesus uses this story to call us to not only prayer but faithful prayer. We should, as Luke says, “Always pray and never give up.” (Luke 18:1)
Praying diligently without giving up, even asking for the same things again and again day after day, is part of the path to relationship with God. When my kids come to me and ask for lunch, it strengthens my relationship with them because they learn that I will provide for them. I don’t wait for them to ask me before I start planning or even preparing their lunch, but there is a relational benefit to their asking. Our relationship with God our Father is similar in many ways. He knows everything we need before we ask (Matthew 6:8). Even so, when we ask, our relationship with Him is strengthened.
Jesus wants us to keep coming back to Him
We were never meant to be able to do life apart from God. From the very beginning, God was in relationship with people in the Garden of Eden. Since sin entered the world through Adam, God has been in constant pursuit of restoring our relationship with Him, even though it is us and not God who broke the relationship.
One of the ways that our relationship with God is maintained is by recognizing that we need God every day. Our needs are new every day, and as a result, we need God’s provision every day. Jesus does not teach us to ask God to provide for our lives in some kind of once for all way. If He had, we might get the wrong idea and think that He is tired of us asking for His help–we are tempted to think that way anyway. Instead, Jesus tells us how God wants us to pray by telling us to come every day to God asking for our needs to be met. This is a clear teaching that God wants this kind of ongoing relationship with us.
When we don’t know what to pray
There are times when all we can think of is what we need. That’s okay. God’s Spirit is interceding for us with everything else. There are times when we are so needy that we can’t even think of what to ask God for. God’s Spirit is praying for us then too. (Romans 8:26) I’ve had these moments with my kids; for whatever reason they are so distressed that they are unable to ask me for what they need or even tell me what’s wrong. In these moments my limited wisdom is a problem. I have to both figure out what they need and how to help them. God our perfect Heavenly Father has no such limitations. He both knows perfectly what we need, and He knows perfectly how to meet our needs. When all we can think to do in our prayers is scream or cry, He still hears and perfectly understands our needs and our hearts, and He still responds to us. Sometimes that’s as close as we can get to praying for God to provide for our day’s needs.
Life will always remind us of things that we need. When it does, we should bring those needs to God. Let’s use these needs as reminders of how much God loves us and wants to be in an ongoing relationship with us.