Imperial Valley Christian Center

3. I Saw It

So I was meditating on what Jesus said about prayer in Matthew 7:7-8 repeating to myself,

“ask and it shall be given you,”

over and over, thinking about it, sometimes the second part,

“for everyone that asked receiveth,”

sometimes both together,

“Ask and it shall be given you…for every one that asketh receiveth….”

After a while of focusing on this part, and I mean days and weeks, not minutes, I decided to make it personal, so I could think about what it would mean if this applied to me, personally. So I began to meditate on it this way:

When I ask it is given to me,

when I ask it is given to me,

when I ask it is given to me…

for everyone that asketh receiveth and I’m an everyone.

It was while meditating this way that I saw what Jesus was saying.

Jesus was saying that God would give me what I asked for when I prayed, that God would do that for everyone, God would give everyone, what they asked for when they prayed. I realized then, I remember chuckling about it because it seemed so obvious, that, that’s what Pastor Price had been saying, those many years before, when he said, “God always answers my prayers.”

Few things are as scary to religious folks as taking God at his word. Religious people would get so upset when Pastor Price said, “God always answers my prayers.” You should see the comments I get on YouTube when I tell people that Jesus said, when they ask it will be given to them. And the thing is, It’s easy to see why Pastor Price, or anyone who actually read the Bible, would say God always answers my prayers, because it’s not just this one verse, that’s how the Bible always talks about prayer.

2. Ask and it shall be given you…

It was maybe 14-15 years after hearing Pastor Price say that God always answered his prayers, that I was meditating on this scripture:

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:8 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened (Matthew 7:7-8 KJV)

I was repeating it out loud to myself, reading it, thinking about it, saying it, chewing on it you could say, over a period of days and weeks. At one point I began to focus on the first part of each verse, so that I was just repeating to myself:

Ask, and it shall be given you… For every one that asketh receiveth…

1. God always answers my prayers.

        That’s what Pastor Price said. We’d been attending his church, Crenshaw Christian Center, a nondenominational, charismatic, word of faith, church in Los Angeles, for a few years. We’d recently moved to the old Pepperdine University Campus at 79th and Vermont, in south central Los Angeles, to accommodate the church’s growth. The Church had plans for a large auditorium but at that time we were meeting in an old theater style building on the campus, and having 3 services on Sunday mornings. We, Becky and I, were sitting a little towards the back of the middle, on the left hand side, when Pastor Price said, “God always answers my prayers.”

        Pastor Price didn’t mean it in that trite, sanctimonious, ‘God always answers my prayers, sometimes he says yes, sometimes he says no, sometimes he says wait a while,’ way. He meant God always gave him what he asked for.