Week 37 Matthew 21
The Lord told his disciples: if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.
Right away I latch onto the phrase you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. It’s an attention-grabber (subconsciously I do a quick mental paraphrase: ‘I’ll get whatever I ask the Lord for’).
Anyway a couple of questions a bible-reader asks pretty regularly are:
a) what does this verse mean?
b) what does it not mean?
So I ask myself b): what does it not mean? And I see right away it doesn’t mean ‘I’ll get whatever I ask the Lord for’ because the verse doesn’t say that. It says: if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. Meaning that I’ll receive whatever I ask for in prayer as long as I believe.
I’ve made a rookie reader’s gaff. I don’t know if there’s an official name for it (let’s call it the Personal Preference Bias). It’s basically that while I’m reading I’m doing two things: 1) I’m latching onto what I like (for instance ‘I’ll get whatever I ask the Lord for’) and 2) I’m skipping over irrelevant-seeming things (for instance ‘if I believe’).
I get a sinking-feeling that the believing part is going to put a serious dent in the asking-and-getting part.
I can ask the Lord for a million things. What I get is what’s caught in the Belief Filter.
Note: quote from Matthew 21:22 (NLT)