Promised Fruit

Promised Fruit

If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you.

John 15:7

IN WORD Taken by itself, it’s a sweeping promise. “Whatever you wish,” Jesus tells the disciples. He could have told them to say, “Not My will but yours,” but He didn’t. That was for other times and other contexts. Here He asks, “What’s your will? If you could ask Me anything your heart desires, what would it be?” In this promise, the heart of the disciple matters.

Jesus could have restricted this promise with a few conditions in His following words, if He had wanted to. But we’re given no hint of any backtracking. In fact, He emphasizes the promise again: “whatever you ask” (15:16; 16:23), and “ask and you will receive” (16:24). In His last instructions to His disciples before the Crucifixion, Jesus tells His disciples over and over again: Ask, ask, ask.

There’s a heartwarming context to all of these instructions about prayer. It is the result of an intimate relationship with Him. We are to ask “so that the Son may bring glory to the Father” (14:13). We are to ask in order to “bear much fruit” and thereby glorify the Father (15:8). We are to ask so that our “joy will be complete” (16:24). In the context of a relationship with Jesus in which His words fill us and His personality has mixed and melded with ours, we are given perhaps the world’s most extravagant promise outside of the promise of our salvation. We can ask anything in His name, for bearing fruit and glory, and expect Him to answer it.

IN DEED If a Fortune 500 company trained you to think and act in its best interests, and then handed you a pile of signed blank checks, what would you do with them? File them away? No, the temptation to use them would be too great. The CEO of the Kingdom of God has signed His name to a stack of checks and handed them to us—to use for advancing His interests. What will you do with them?

I would rather teach one man to pray than ten men to preach.

—JOHN HENRY JOWETT