DAILY DEVOTIONAL TODAY - July 30, 2023 || Our Daily Bread [Daily Devotion] | MamClaireTV

Devotional Message:
(Luke 11:9-10)
"So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Jesus suggests that there are three levels of prayer: Ask, seek, and knock.

You can remember them, incidentally, if you take note of the fact that the initial letters spell the word "ask". There you have a little formula for prayer. Now mark these three different levels. The circumstances of each are vastly different, but the answer is the same.

The simplest and easiest level, of course, is ask. What he means is that there are certain needs which require a mere asking to be immediately and invariably met, and the range of these needs is far wider than we usually give credit for.

If we need love, courage, wisdom, power or patience then they all lie in this realm. Simply ask - that is all, ask - and immediately the answer is given.

A second level of prayer is denoted by this word "seek." You cannot think of what it means to seek without seeing that our Lord injects here an element of time. Seeking is not a simple act, it is a process, a series of acts. Jesus says there are areas of life that require more than asking; there must be seeking, searching.

There is still a third level which involves "knocking". Here, both time and repetition are involved. It is a request, repeated if necessary, and it suggests situations where we seek an entrance, or an opportunity.

Perhaps we have an unshakable desire to begin a certain type of work. We long to move into that area, we feel God leading us, calling us, to be this or do that. That requires knocking.

We come before God and boldly and repeatedly ask, each time making an endeavor to enter in, for we are resting on the solid assurance that what Jesus says