SO, JUST ASK

There I was, mowing the lawn with a relatively new lawnmower which I love. I also love to mow the lawn. All of a sudden I heard a loud clunk, clunk, sputter, then silence. Heck, it was usually easy to start the relatively new mower, always only taking one pull of the cord and it immediately hummed like an expensive motor boat engine. No such luck this time. Ten pulls and it was silent, not a chug, not a hum, nothing. I was going out of town, so before leaving I called my loving and loyal son De who always is ready to help me with my chores, eager to help fix broken items, etc. As usual, he was amenable to stopping by my house during my absence and checking out the lawn mower. My expert assessment (I absolutely have no experience in motors) was that it needed a new spark plug which I had not replaced over the winter. While away on my out-of-town trip I got a phone call from De and he told me that he had fixed the mower. I asked if the problem was the spark plug. Laughingly, son De said, “No, it wasn’t the spark plug, but did you add more oil to the mower?” Yes, I had taken care of that chore myself before I had mowed the last time, doing what I thought was the proper thing to do. I had filled the oil tank up to the top. Still laughing, my son told me that I had added too much oil and when he started the mower that oil had sputtered out of the motor and smoke filled the garage. He emptied the oil tank and started all over again, only adding what the instruction book said to add. The problem was solved and after returning home I found that the mower started again with the first pull of the cord. It mowed the entire large yard like the dream mower that I had bought. Yes, I should have asked son De to put oil in the mower instead of doing it myself. In fact, while I was mowing the yard the words of my daughter-in-law Kay kept coming to my mind. One time when I did something similar, she said, “When you have something that needs to be done, all you need to do is ask.” I should have asked them about adding oil to the mower. I know that now. Also while mowing the lawn another thought came to my mind, the thought that Jesus said, “Ask and you will receive.” That was His way of saying the same thing Kay said to me, that all I have to do is ask and they will help me. As I was thinking about the similarities, I knew that De and Kay can’t invade my house and do anything they want to do, because it’s my house. Even though they are family, it’s my house and they can’t come in and fix anything unless I ask them because I might have some other plan in the works relating to an item. They have to ask me and I have to give them permission to help me. It’s the same way with God. He has the ability and the power to fix everything in the earth because he created it and he gave the wisdom for all mechanical or physical creations. BUT, it’s the same thing as with my son and me, we have to ask God to fix something in our lives. God can’t legally come into our earth without being asked because He originally gave the earth to people when He told them to have dominion over it. He made people the bosses of the earth, the managers, the caretakers. So He has to be asked to come into the earth, into the life of a person, before He can come in to perform His Mr. Fix-It chores. God has a multitude of workers called angels who come into our situations with Him to help Him bring perfect solutions to our problems when we ask Him. People say that they have asked God to come into their lives and fix something and He didn’t do it. They fail to realize that it took them a long time to break their marriage, their family, their profession or their friendships, and it will take some time to move people around, bring counselors into their lives and change the hearts of the people who are involved. It took time for you to mess it up and it takes time for God to get the mechanics in place to fix it to perfection. Yes, sometimes people lose patience and give up on God just before the perfect solution for the situation emerges. My sister had a dream one time in which there were huge, beautifully wrapped gifts in a room. In the dream she asked why they hadn’t been unwrapped and a voice of Wisdom in the room said, “The people gave up on their faith and lost patience. Inside the packages are all the answers to their prayers” It’s never God who is the problem. The problem is from the earth side. God said it’s His good pleasure to give His entire kingdom to his children. Very often, we ask God’s help and then go our merry ways and continue doing the things that caused the devil to rob us of our blessings. We ask God to perfect the situation, but we continue to curse other people, continue to use anger to injure others, we speak negatively of our governing authorities, we sow seeds of strife with others, we do the works of evil in our lives but expect God to answer our desperate prayer. We can’t play on God’s team, asking Him to solve our problems, and also continue to play on the team of the evil one who tempted us to get into the devastating problem originally. We can’t be double minded, asking for God’s help and all the time also playing on the team of the opponent who caused our problem. We need to be either for God or against God. We can’t be dependent upon Him to fix our problem while we are entertaining the spiritual entities who caused the problem. While my son was fixing my lawn mower, I couldn’t allow some neighborhood ruffians to beat on the mower and pour oil, gasoline, weed killer and insect killer on the mower while he worked on it to perfect it for me. The Apostle James said that we don’t have because we do not ask. He also said that sometimes we ask and don’t receive because we sometimes ask amiss. We cannot expect God to kill someone because we are mad at them for making us unhappy. That is against the nature of God. We can’t expect God to cause someone’s business to fail so that ours will succeed. He is no respecter of persons. That would be asking amiss. God can work miracles in your life if you ask and if you walk in love, forgiving others and refusing to judge others. Those are the works that He said when He said that faith without works is dead and when He said that faith works by love. All of that is covered in the book of James in the Instruction Book. Hey, all we need to do is ask and continue to play on God‘s team, being loving and forgiving. God said to walk in communion with His Spirit and you won’t fulfill the lusts of the flesh. He said to pray in the understanding and in the Spirit and magnify His power by praising Him and thanking Him even before the answer to prayers are manifested. Just ask. It’s so simple. Everything with God is simple. We make it difficult by believing the thoughts of doubt and fear which invade our minds. So, just ask.