THERE’S AN ONGOING joke in our family, a story that gets told again and again. It goes all the way back to when the kids were small. One year on Veteran’s Day, we decided to do something different — just because. We set up our tent in the living room, and all slept in it that night, as if we were on a family camping trip. It was the best of both worlds, a mini-staycation without nosy bears or midnight hikes through the cold and dark to go to the bathroom. The kids enjoyed it and wanted to do it again the following year. My wife said yes, and that was that.

Until Veteran’s Day rolled around again.

“Can we set up the tent?” our daughter asked hopefully. This time, my wife said no. Being the incredibly wise person that I am, I stayed out of it. “But you promised!” she wailed, to no avail. “I didn’t promise,” my wife countered, “I said we could, but I didn’t say we would.” Back and forth it went.

My wife knew that the tent had been used for real camping trips and wasn’t particularly clean. And the living room, which was the only place the tent would fit, had a white carpet. Suffice it to say that there was no indoor camp-out (camp-in?) that year, nor any year thereafter.

We all laugh over that story now; it gets told every November. But at the heart of the story is an important question: what is or isn’t a promise?

I’M RAISING THAT question before we consider the next passage in the Sermon on the Mount, because what Jesus says can easily be misread and misused:

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. (Matt 7:7-8, NIV)

Earlier, I spoke of the difference between needs and wants, a distinction that’s lost on young children. Kids come to their parents with all kinds of requests, big and small, reasonable and unreasonable. Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes no. Naturally, kids don’t like hearing no. But when parents consistently give their children what they need even when they don’t want it, and from time to time also grant them what they want even if they don’t need it, kids eventually learn the difference.

Sometimes though, even as adults, we come to Scripture looking for promises that God will give us what we ask, without making a distinction between needs and wants or letting God define what we really need. Virtually any Bible verse about God’s care and compassion can be turned into a “promise” that obligates God to grant whatever we ask for, as long as our prayer is earnest and faithful. And when we don’t get the answer we want, or don’t get it when we want it, we’re tempted to question God’s goodness.

So what is Jesus promising in the Sermon on the Mount? It’s worth noting just how vague Jesus’ language is, especially in verse 8. “For everyone who asks receives,” he says, without saying what the person receives. “The one who seeks finds” — yes, but again, finds what? And even if the door is opened when we knock, nothing is said about what’s on the other side.

As promises go, it’s pretty iffy. But none of that stops us from projecting our wants and needs into his words. We may believe that God will give us whatever we ask. We trust that if we seek diligently enough, we’ll find exactly what we’re looking for. And if we persist in prayer, we expect God to swing wide the door to opportunity.

I’m exaggerating to make a point. We don’t really think of God as a cosmic vending machine, or prayer as a magical incantation that makes our every wish come true, do we? Well, maybe just a little?

Let’s get down to cases. God clearly and concretely promised Abraham a son of his own, and made good on that promise. But Isaac wasn’t born until a full 25 years after the promise was made, and in the meantime Abraham and Sarah had tried taking matters into their own hands. So even if you believed God had made you that kind of promise, how long would you be willing to wait before you concluded that God had gone back on his word?

Or take Paul. I think here of what he wrote to the church in Philippi near the end of his letter to them:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Phil 4:6-7)

“Do not be anxious,” Paul says, using the same word as Jesus did in Matthew 6. We are to bring all of our anxious requests to God and pray with grateful hearts. And then…what? Paul doesn’t say that God will give us what we ask for, though of course he can and might. Rather, he says that God will give us his peace in place of the anxiety that drove the prayer. It may not be exactly what we wanted, but from God’s perspective, it’s what we need.

IN THE CONTEXT of the Sermon on the Mount, we should read what Jesus promises here in Matthew 7 in light of what he’s already said in chapter 6. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, is indeed one in which we ask our Father for what we need. But we do so in the humility of remembering that his will is sovereign, asking for forgiveness and protection from temptation. No cosmic vending machine there.

And when Jesus promises that whoever seeks will find, what is it that we seek? Anything and everything we want? No. In chapter 6, what we are taught to seek is God’s kingdom, instead of the basic needs for which we are encouraged to trust the loving providence of God.

Again, our Father knows what we need before we ask. We don’t ask, seek, and knock to tell him something he doesn’t know, nor to corner him into giving us what we want. We pray in order to come before our heavenly Father with all of who we are, including our wants and needs, and submit ourselves to his loving will. And as Jesus will say next, God can be trusted to do right by us.