Too often, we read these words of Jesus without careful thought of the context, and we are seized by the tremendous possibilities of the word, “whatever.” The material-minded leap up and say, “I can have that new car, the new house, the new job that I’ve always wanted.” But James 4:3 reminds us: “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
But we must not overlook the qualifier to this promise: “along the lines of who I am and what I’m doing.” Some think they have fulfilled this when they tack on, “In Jesus’ name” at the end of our prayer; then God will suddenly do all we ask. But many of our petitions are not prayed in Jesus’ name at all.
Praying in Jesus’ name means to pray in His place; to stand in Jesus’ place. And where was Jesus standing when He said these words? Facing the cross. Facing the end, the apparent collapse and failure of all of His work. But Jesus knew that beyond the cross lay the resurrection and that there could be no new beginning if there were not first an end of all that the others saw and hoped for. Jesus knew that it had to be.
To pray in Jesus’ name means that we accept the process of God, by which He brings matters, often, to utter collapse. But that’s not the end! Beyond it is a resurrection and a new beginning of such different quality that the mind moves into an ecstasy of joy in contemplating it.
This is why it often seems that God waits until the very last moment to answer our prayer. God won’t halt the process before heartache and pain come but allows it to experience death—and out of death comes resurrection. To pray in Jesus’ name means that we consent to that process; that we are aware that prayer is not merely a shield to prevent things from happening. Prayer is our commitment to undergo the end and the collapse and the failure. But that is never the end of the story. It is only out of death that life comes
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