1 John 5:14-15 English Standard Version

14 And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.

Knowing His will is the trick. We can have anything if it is His will and we ask for it.

Have you ever wondered why we have to ask if it is His will? If it is His will, aren’t we going to get it anyway?

Father God is our Father. How else are we going to demonstrate we are in this relationship with Him if we don’t talk to Him?

We obey by faith, we obey commands, we do what is right. We can do all that without Him. In any relationship communication is a key element or else we are living this life without involving Him.

James 4:1-5 English Standard Version

4 What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 2 You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. 4 You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5 Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”?

God yearns for us in this relationship. He yearns jealously. He allowed His Son to die a horrible death in order to have this relationship with us and to ignore Him is disrespectful.

James uses the term “You adulterous people.” That is harsh but it does express just how much God loves us. It is like we cheat on God when we seek things for ourselves in our relationship with the world.

We don’t like to be taken for granted. Why do we take God for granted?

V 6 But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

We allow pride to get in the way.

Ephesians 4:15-16 English Standard Version

15 Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

Families are complicated. There are big families, small families, connected ones and fractured ones. Not all families have a head of household in the traditional sense. That is getting to be more the case these days for all the wrong reasons.

We cannot look to our personal family history for an example of how this body of Christ is to pull together. The head of this body is God. He is perfect in love and He does not make the mistakes that the head of our families made.

In our family history we grew up to go away and find a life of our own. We were to become matriarchs and patriarchs in our own right. In the body of Christ we are never meant to grow apart, but to grow up to be closer united by this common love which is uncommon.

Families these days get fractured because we run around doing our own thing. We busy ourselves finding our way in the world, trying to make it, change it, and cutting out a piece of it for ourselves and our posterity.

Not so with this body of Christ when we discover that we are equipped with gifts that are meant to draw us closer together into a finely tuned instrument.

What makes it difficult for us to see in this new family is that our brothers and sisters in Christ are located all over the world. Most of them we have never met but Christ knows them all and is the head of their body too. 

In that way we feel like a fractured family but we are not. We all answer to Christ.

A key phrase above is “when each part is working properly”.