Jesus keeps talking and I am getting more and more excited. He is telling the disciples about the power of prayer, and he has launched into a story of a man who knocks on his friend’s door at midnight to borrow bread, and he receives the bread because of his impudence. Then Jesus reinforces the point, and ratchets up our excitement, with a comparison of a father to a son who asks his father for bread: The good father will not trick him with a stone.

What a fabulous promise: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Luke 11:9-10).

Then when your enthusiasm has crescendoed, and you are already envisioning all the things on your wish list, you come to the very last sentence of this section, and you read: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” Instant deflation.

What! The Holy Spirit? That’s not exactly what I had in mind. I mean, don’t we already have the Holy Spirit anyway, from the time we’re saved?

That’s how I used to feel. I was always disappointed when I got to verse 13 and learned that Jesus only had in mind the giving of the Holy Spirit. But God must be doing a work in me, because nowadays when I read this passage, I get excited all the way through to the end, because receiving more of the Holy Spirit is better than anything else on my wish list.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.