HOW MUCH MORE ?

Lk.11:13 – So if you, despite being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?

This verse shows us the end or fulfillment of all prayer. You may come to the Lord with a desperate cry for some personal need in your life yet not really be in touch with what your true need really is. You may originally be seeking the answer for an incurable illness, financial disaster, wayward children, or a troubled marriage. These are the sorts of things that will bring any of us to our knees and the Lord is faithful to answer these kinds of prayers. But if this verse is true the supplicant may be in for a gigantic surprise. You may very well get the answer to your prayer but that time spent in calling out to God often puts you in a place to receive that thing that your heart is really calling out for. Often you are not even aware of what your heart is really seeking, the answer is seen in today’s verse, the promise of the Father. You thought you were looking for one answer but you got more than you bargained for, God Himself showed up in your place of prayer. Here is how Andrew Murray describes this.

“We can easily understand the unspeakable worth of this gift. Jesus spoke of the Spirit as the promise of my Father – the one promise in which God’s fatherhood revealed itself. The best gift a good and wise father can bestow on a child on earth is his own spirit. This is the great object of a father in education – to reproduce in his child his own disposition and character. If the child is to know and understand his father, if he is to enter into all his will and plans as he grows up, and if he is to have his highest joy in the father and the father in him, he must be of one mind and spirit with him. So, it is impossible to conceive of God bestowing any higher gift on His child than this “– His own Spirit. God is what He is through His Spirit; the Spirit is the very life of God. Just think what it means – God giving His own Spirit to His child on earth.”

That is the very essence of prayer and the answer to our hungry heart. Jesus said that He had living water to give us that would quench the thirst of our souls. The Holy Spirit is that living water, drink deeply of Him in prayer and you will never thirst again.