KIDS ASK FOR a lot of things from their parents, and sometimes parents have a hard time saying no. I know of one child whose mom gave her son whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. Maybe she couldn’t deal with his crying and complaining. Maybe she thought she was doing him a favor. But the result wasn’t gratitude for his mother’s generosity. He just made more demands, and she kept giving in. Now, even as a teenager, he throws a fit in public if he doesn’t get his way.

The boy is going to have to live in a world in which other people aren’t going to be so easy on him. Life is going to be tough.

But even parents who know the importance of limits sometimes struggle to set them. Kids want what they want, and it takes them a while to learn that the world won’t end if they don’t get it. Parents have to weather the storms as calmly as possible.

And it helps to set a living example of what it means to live within limits. As one father told me, whenever his child asked for a new toy or something she had seen on TV, he told her, “We don’t have the money for that.” That worked for a while. But then she figured it out. One day, when he told her again that they didn’t have the money, she looked him straight in the eye and asked, “But you have a credit card, don’t you?”

Busted.

As we come to the final verses of 1 John, I worry that some will read his words in a way that a spoiled child might, expecting to get whatever they want from God, as long as they ask nicely in Jesus’ name and say a pious “Amen” at the end. Admittedly, it does sound like John is making a pretty sweeping promise. Listen to what he says in verses 14 and 15 of chapter 5:

This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him. (1 John 5:14-15, NIV)

Indeed, in the Upper Room, even Jesus told his disciples, “whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you” (John 15:16). Are both Jesus and John saying that God will give us anything we ask for in prayer?

Of course not. I’m reminded of what the apostle James taught: some people may expect God to answer their prayers, but they don’t get what they want because their prayers are self-indulgent (James 4:3). We can make the prayer as flowery as we like, but if the motives are wrong, the answer will be No.

Moreover, again, context is everything. When Jesus told the disciples that the Father would give them whatever they asked for in his name, he wasn’t giving them some secret password or magical formula for getting God’s Yes to any and every prayer. Jesus said these words in the context of commanding them to abide in his love and to love one another just as he had already loved them. What kind of prayer would fit that context? Not a selfish one, certainly, but something more along the lines of, “Father, I’m having trouble loving Brother Bob right now, and could really use your help.”

And context makes a difference to how we read John’s words as well. The “confidence” John is writing about is the confidence his readers lost when conflict divided the community. The secessionists confused them with their odd ideas about Jesus, even making them question whether they had eternal life the way they thought they did.

So listen to John’s words again, but this time, try to imagine him writing to people who had lost confidence in their relationship to God:

This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.

The confidence that his readers have lost seems first of all to be that God even hears their prayers. We know what that’s like, don’t we? Even the psalmists, pouring out their words of lament and suffering to God, sometimes wondered if God was paying attention. It’s tempting to think that God isn’t listening when our prayers seem to go unanswered, when things don’t change the way we want them to. But that would be like a child not getting what he wants and thinking his parents aren’t listening, or worse, that his parents don’t love him. As many have pointed out, sometimes, God’s answer to a prayer is “No,” or “Not yet.” We have to trust that God still loves us and knows what’s best — even if God’s opinion on the matter differs from our own.

We can be confident, John says, that God hears our prayers. Then he goes further, saying that if we know that God hears us, then we have whatever we’ve asked. But we can’t leave out what may be the most important qualifier in the passage. John is not talking about any random prayer we might toss toward heaven; he’s talking about requests that are made according to God’s will.

Again, think about Jesus’ words in the Upper Room. His will for his disciples was for them to abide in him, to abide in his love, like the branches of a grapevine abide in and draw life from the trunk. They were to bear the fruit of love, especially in their love for one another. A prayer to be empowered to love Brother Bob is definitely in accordance with Jesus’ will.

But a prayer for Brother Bob to be struck by lightning? Not so much.

What prayers would have been according to God’s will in John’s context? Remember, John is writing a letter, not a treatise on prayer, so may have in mind particular prayers that his readers had offered but without confidence that they had been heard. We can only speculate as to what those may have been, and the next couple of verses may even give us a clue.

But for now, suffice it to say that if we want to embody what John is teaching his readers, it won’t be by expecting God to give us whatever we happen to desire. It will be by learning, bit by bit, through a lifetime of faith and obedience, to desire what God desires.