top of page

Ask and You Will Receive

jakebbrock52




Many people that embark upon the spiritual journey experience disappointment with and discouragement over their progress or lack of it. They are drawn to the spiritual life and hopeful for all that it promises to bring them, but somewhere along the path they take inventory and deduce that they have not laid hold of the promised rewards to the extent that they hoped they would. Instead of abundant life and living waters, they have found only a trickle. And when this happens it is not uncommon for one to become so disillusioned that he or she decides to give up and leave the path altogether.


So, what is the problem here? Is the fault with us, or is the promise of spiritual life just an empty fantasy? In my experience neither of these answers rings true. There is nothing wrong with us; nor is the spiritual life void of substance. Rather what generally hinders us is our culturally conditioned value system. We think that we value the things of the spiritual life, when, deep down, what we value most are the worldly rewards that we hope to receive from it. We want to know more, feel better, have more peace of mind, look better, have more energy, etc. And since our conditioning happened to us when we were infants, we cannot be said to be fully responsible for this unspiritual reflex. Our self-serving Adamic oriented value system was largely imposed upon us from birth. What this causes is a kind of unconscious rift between our hopes and our actual motivating instincts. And since the laws that govern spiritual life are unyielding, if our motives are askew we may receive but a restricted flow or even be in danger of being turned away—a situation that we may then tend to justify by saying to ourselves that the

spiritual life was not really meant for us after all.


This does not mean, however, that we are insincere about our hopes; it only means that our culturally conditioned value system has undermined our higher aspirations. So the question then becomes one of how to overrule that unconscious ignoble instinct and not only stay on the journey but also begin to prosper on it more and more. Of course, we can force ourselves to persist. But this usually only leads to greater disillusionment. What then? What do people do when they run out of answers for themselves? They ask for help.


Granted, needing help to get back on track in the spiritual life is a different predicament than most of the worldly problems we are faced with and are determined to overcome. Most worldly problems have human experts that we can turn to for help. For example, if we were to need help with relationship issues we could turn to a therapist. Or if we needed help with a financial problem we could turn to a financial advisor, etc. But needing help in the spiritual life is a little trickier. We may see the wisdom in reaching out and asking for help, but how exactly do we do that? Where do we turn, and whom do we ask? Certainly, the spiritual masters can help us indirectly through studying their teachings. But if we are in a crisis-mode that is threatening to derail us from the path altogether we may need more than that. And in the spiritual life there is often no human expert in our circle that we can turn to for that kind of counsel. So what do the masters advocate that we should do in such a case? Go directly to the source. Ask God.


Jesus taught that spiritual life is the dominion of God. And who or what is God? It is infinite, all-knowing consciousness. And since human spirituality is also an activity of consciousness, what better expert could there be on the subject? So Jesus not only taught that we should ask God; he used his knowledge of God’s nature as the logical basis for that teaching, saying: “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! Therefore ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-11).


But God, though perhaps like a father to us, is not a personal being. It is impersonal spiritual consciousness. So how does this dynamic actually play out? If we ask, how is the answer most likely to come to us?


First of all, like all other spiritual activities, receiving an answer from God is an outworking of created universal law. It is a legal dynamic that begins with us. In other words, we will receive no answers unless and until we ask. Why is this? Because that is the legal mechanism that unleashes spiritual power. To receive an answer we must initiate the proceedings with asking. Furthermore, our asking must be of a certain legal quality, in order to elicit a true universal response. It must be fully conscious and heart-felt. That is why Jesus equated asking with seeking and knocking. Our asking must be so sincere that it goes further than a polite request. It becomes an urgent and importunate force in its own right. Then when this requirement of the quality of our asking is fulfilled we will indeed begin to receive an answer. What kind of an answer? What form will it take? That is a strictly individual dynamic. But if we are asking for help to be able to proceed forward and go deeper in the spiritual life, we can be sure that help of one form or another to enable and empower us to do this will be forthcoming. It may come through a renewed perspective of our goals and progress, an increase in our spiritual energy, a new sense of commitment, etc. It may even come by way of a personal word that somehow becomes clear to us. Whatever the case may be, help will come when we ask aright. Therefore that is all we really need to do.


But alas, asking God for help may still strike us as being more of a wishful ploy than a realistic solution. Why is this? Again the culprit is probably our conditioned Adamic mindset.

In our culture we have been taught to value help that is tangible and obvious, not subtle and mystical. We see such help as real and substantial, rather than merely wishful and mysterious. A good example of this comes to mind. Suppose you encounter a homeless person on the street and feel impressed to try to help them. While the eternal truth may be that what they need most in order to free themselves from their difficult karmic predicament is to hear a testimony of the benefits and power of the spiritual life, our culture frowns upon that kind of help and sees it as flimsy and insubstantial. It would be tantamount to offering that homeless person pie-in-the-sky, while ignoring the fact their belly is empty now—an approach that is not only socially frowned upon but even considered to be cruel. On the other hand, if you were to offer to feed that person and put them up in a motel room for a few nights you would surely be lauded as a saint. This is because our culturally shared values do not line up with eternal values. Rather they lean heavily to the side of practical material help.


This was what Jesus encountered everywhere he went. As long as he was busy healing people of their diseases and infirmities he was hailed as a miracle worker. But when his emphasis was on sharing spiritual truth with the people they were not nearly

as enthusiastic. True, they stayed and listened, but their minds were all the while focused on what Jesus could and would do for them materially if they indulged him and acted as though they were interested in his teaching. For instance, after he had miraculously multiplied five loaves of bread and a few fish to feed five thousand people, they wanted to make him their king. But how did Jesus respond to their intent? Not only did he utterly reject it, he rebuked them sharply, saying: “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life.” (John 6:27). In other words, they had their hearts set on what Jesus could do for them materially if he were king (such as feed them miraculously everyday so that they did not have to work), and in so doing, totally missed the “real food” that Jesus had to give. Thus their unspiritual values not only frustrated Jesus, they kept the people ostensibly sold to their karma. And where did those unspiritual values come from? From their cultural conditioning.


Jesus yearned for the people to value the true gifts that he had to give. He saw how materialistic and unspiritual they had become and knew that much of their suffering had its source is this aberrant life orientation. Much like it is for us, for them the spiritual life was filled with impediments and inertia. They viewed it as burdensome, and instead of asking Jesus for help they simply indulged him, almost seeing his strong spiritual focus as an imbalanced fault. They took the materialistic help he had to offer but hardened their hearts to his true gifts. Thus it did not even occur to them to ask.


In essence, in their hearts the people treated Jesus exactly like Isaiah the Prophet predicted that they would in the fifty-third chapter of his book. They looked upon him as having little to offer, with nothing about his appearance that they should desire him. They saw him as a troubled obsessive young man, perhaps even demon-possessed—a lonely man, afflicted and suffering, familiar with pain. He was homeless, penniless, and without family or friends. In truth, they despised him, like one from whom people hide their faces. They even considered him to be cursed by God. How could one who was so obviously void of and inept in the things of the world teach them about God? And what caused them to take this view? Their culturally conditioned value system.


Was this treatment painful for Jesus? You bet it was. For not only did he know what was in the people’s hearts but he also was a deeply sensitive soul. In truth, for one such as him there was no greater pain than to be treated as though no one wanted what he had to offer. That is why asking was so important to him. At least it would have been a start—an indication that the people were open to receiving. True, they asked for healing. Why? Because they were so hard-pressed and miserable in their diseased condition. But very few indeed asked him for the kind of help that he was most desirous of giving.


This dynamic played out one day with a Samaritan woman whom he encountered drawing water from a well. Being thirsty, he asked her for a drink of water from her jar. And she did not hesitate to give this to him. But then Jesus caught her very much off-guard, saying these words to her (paraphrased): “If you knew who it is that has asked you for a drink you would have asked him to give you what he has to offer.” But like all of materialistically conditioned humanity, the woman probably thought to herself, “This man has nothing. He is obviously poor, as his tattered cloak shows. He even had to ask me for a drink of water. What could he possibly have to give me?” And so her response was to smile as if he were mentally a little off. What did Jesus have to offer the women? Nothing less than true spiritual-eternal life—the life that frees us from our karmic bondage. She offered him a drink of water from the well, but what he had to offer was

living water. And so he said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water [the water from the well] will soon be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst again. Indeed the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:4-13). But sadly, so few of us in our conditioned state desire such water. We do not value it enough to even ask.


When Jesus said to the woman, “If you knew who it is that has asked you for a drink,” he was, in fact, honing in on another one of our main spiritual insufficiencies. In other words, another reason that we do not think to ask God for help is that we do not know God aright. We do not know God as the impersonal omniscient Spirit that created our universe and set everything in motion in that act of creation based on immutable universal law. We do not know God as an all-loving Father, who desires more than anything to see us set free from our karmic bounds. We do not know God as infinite consciousness—the consciousness that created us in Its image. And we do not know the Law of God that would achieve all this simply through the mechanism of our asking for it. Then to top it all off, even if we were to come to know God aright we probably would still be reluctant to ask Him for help. Why? Because deep down we don’t really value the kind of help that God has to offer. We would rather have a meal and a bed for the night. Now that would be help indeed.

2 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

The Power of Love

Human beings have always been fascinated by and obsessed with power. In fact, if one accepts the Bible as being historically valid, it...

The Age of Harvest

Throughout this age the emphasis has been on the evolution of consciousness of individuals, not on the collective. The collective has,...

The Law of Creation

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night...

Comentarios


© 2023 by Name of Site. Proudly created with Wix.com

121376_426f45727f96437ba3db0ed893f36407~mv2_edited.png
Garden in My Soul Cover.jpg
bottom of page