In John 14:13 Jesus tells his disciples, “I will do whatever you ask in my name,” and again in verse 14, “You may ask me for anything in my name and I will do it.” Whatever Jesus meant by that, the use of “in my name” carried with it a promise to answer their requests to him. And, what’s more, anyone who believed it “will do what I’ve been doing,” verse 12 – and “do even greater things too, because I’m going to the Father.”
Jesus “going to the Father” was important for the disciples to know too, because that’s when the Father will “give me all authority in heaven and earth ” (Matthew 28:18). Which means Jesus will also have the power to answer what his disciples ask of him.
To add to that, Jesus has a purpose for answering his disciples’ prayers too, “so that the Son may bring glory to the Father,” John 14:13. And how Jesus brings glory to the Father is in his disciples “bearing much fruit” (15:8), the kind of fruit, that is, that demonstrates in the disciples’ lives what the Father’s purpose is – that he’s restoring humans to what he intended us to be in the beginning.
Three things, then, are connected to asking Jesus “in his name”: promise, power, and purpose. It means he promises to answer, he has the power to answer, and he has a purpose in answering.
But he’d never told his disciples to specifically “ask in my name” before. It didn’t make any sense either, because why would they need to ask in his name when he was still there with them in person? He was about to die too, so even if they did ask him in his name he couldn’t do what they asked for anyway. So what was Jesus getting at?
Well, in verse 18, he said, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” And come to them he would, not as the physical human they’d been able to ask in person to, but as the resurrected Jesus and the mighty Son of God in the full splendour of his majesty and power. It was that Jesus they’d be praying to in future, “the Jesus whom God had made both Lord and Christ,” Acts 2:36. So when Jesus promised that “anyone who has faith in me will do even greater things,” he meant faith in the Jesus he was about to become, because that’s when he’d truly have the power to fulfill his Father’s purpose in them.
With that in mind, then, “Must we end every prayer ‘in Jesus’ name’?”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 