What is meant by you will be given whatever you ask for in my name?

Question 11077

Asking in my name is one of the most quoted promises Jesus ever made and one of the most consistently mishandled. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son (John 14:13). Read on its own, that sentence sounds like a blank cheque with a signature already on it, and a good deal of popular teaching has treated it exactly so.

The difficulty is that the promise plainly does not work as a blank cheque, and every honest Christian knows it. So either Jesus overstated the case, which is unthinkable, or we have misunderstood what praying in my name actually means.

What Praying in My Name Does Not Mean

It is not a formula. The phrase in my name is not an incantation appended to the end of a request to activate it, in the way a password unlocks an account. If that were the mechanism, the Christian life would consist of remembering to say the magic words, and the promise would work for anybody who pronounced them correctly, including the sons of Sceva in Acts 19, for whom it went badly.

Neither is it a device for overriding the will of God. Some teaching effectively presents the name of Jesus as leverage, a means by which the believer secures compliance from heaven. That inverts the whole relationship. The Son who taught us to pray in my name is the same Son who prayed in Gethsemane that the Father’s will be done rather than His own (Luke 22:42), and who did not get what He asked for in the terms He first asked it.

Nor is it a guarantee that the answer will take the shape you had in mind. Paul asked three times for the thorn to be removed and received grace instead (2 Corinthians 12:8-9). If anyone knew how to pray in my name it was Paul, and the answer was no. Any reading of John 14 that cannot accommodate 2 Corinthians 12 has already failed.

What Praying in My Name Does Mean

In the ancient world a name stood for the whole person, their character, their authority and their standing. The Greek onoma carries far more weight than a label. To act in someone’s name was to act as their authorised representative, within the limits of what that person would actually sanction. An ambassador who signs a treaty in his king’s name and exceeds his mandate has not bound the king to anything.

So praying in my name means praying as one who belongs to Jesus, on the basis of what He has done, and in line with what He wants. It is access and alignment together. Access, because the whole reason a sinner may approach the Father at all is that the Son has opened the way (Hebrews 10:19-22). Alignment, because a representative asks for what his sender desires.

John says as much himself in his first letter. This is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us (1 John 5:14). That is not a new condition bolted on afterwards; it is John spelling out what he had already recorded Jesus as saying. The phrase in my name and the phrase according to his will are two ways of describing the same thing.

Notice also the stated purpose in John 14:13. Jesus does it that the Father may be glorified in the Son. The promise has a goal written into it, and requests that could not serve that goal fall outside the terms. This is not a restriction imposed on a generous offer; it is the offer’s own logic.

The Context Nobody Quotes

John 14 sits in the upper room discourse, hours before the crucifixion, addressed to men who are about to lose the physical presence of their Master and be sent out to do the work He began. The promise about praying in my name is given in the same breath as the promise that they will do greater works, and immediately before the promise of the Spirit who will be with them for ever.

That setting matters enormously. These are promises about mission, not about comfort or accumulation. The disciples are being told that the departure of Jesus will not leave the work stranded, because they will have access to the Father in His name and the Spirit within them. Prayer here is the equipment of people sent to do something.

Read that way, the promise is not diminished at all. It is enormous. It means that a fisherman in Galilee may address the God of heaven with the standing of the Son and expect to be heard, and that the resources of the Godhead stand behind the mission. What it is not is a mechanism for personal wish fulfilment.

James Puts His Finger on the Problem

James is blunt about why prayers go unanswered. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions (James 4:2-3). The problem is not technique. It is the direction of the desire.

This is the pastoral heart of the matter. A request offered in my name is one the Lord Himself would endorse if He were standing at your shoulder. Ask yourself that question about the last few things you prayed for and the answer is usually clarifying, sometimes uncomfortably so. Many of my own requests would not survive that examination.

James is not saying that God has no interest in your circumstances. He is saying that prayer is not a delivery service for the self. When the asking is aimed at spending on our passions, praying in my name has become a form of words attached to something Jesus never authorised.

The Prosperity Distortion

A whole movement has been built on the misreading. If the phrase in my name confers automatic power, then health, wealth and success are available on demand, and any shortfall must be the fault of the person praying. That teaching has left a long trail of damaged people who were told their child died because they did not believe hard enough.

It fails on the text and it fails on the evidence. The apostles who first received this promise were beaten, imprisoned and executed. Paul left Trophimus ill at Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20). Timothy had a recurring stomach complaint and got advice about wine rather than a healing (1 Timothy 5:23). Either the apostolic generation could not work the formula, or there is no formula.

I have written at more length on the origins of this teaching in my answer on the Word of Faith movement’s genealogy and on its practical dangers in the dangers of the prosperity gospel. See also the related question on what Jesus meant by speaking to this mountain.

What Then Should We Expect?

Real confidence, is the answer. Praying in my name means you are never approaching God as an intruder or a petitioner hoping to catch Him in a good mood. You come with the standing of the Son, and the Father is disposed towards you accordingly. That should make our praying bolder than it usually is, not more timid.

Expect answers, then, and expect some of them to arrive in a form you did not request. The father who gives good gifts (Matthew 7:11) reserves the right to define good. I have prayed for things I now thank God He withheld, and I suspect most believers over forty could say the same.

Expect also to be changed by praying. Aligning your requests with the will of Jesus is not a hoop to jump through before the real business begins. It is the real business. A believer who prays seriously in my name for twenty years ends up wanting different things than he did at the start.

What Happens When the Answer Is No

This is where the doctrine has to survive contact with real life. You have prayed properly, with right motives, for something good, and it has not happened. The marriage ended. The treatment failed. The church closed.

Scripture does not offer a tidy explanation, and I will not invent one. What it offers is the assurance that the Father heard, that He is working towards a purpose we can see only in fragments, and that Jesus Himself prayed in Gethsemane and received an answer that cost Him everything before it saved the world.

So keep asking. Unanswered prayer is not evidence that the promise was false or that you failed to operate it correctly. It is evidence that we are still living in an age where the kingdom has come and has not yet come in full, and where trust is required precisely because sight is not yet given.

So, now what?

Take your usual list of requests and hold each one up against the purpose Jesus stated: that the Father may be glorified in the Son. Some will pass immediately. Some will need reframing rather than abandoning, because the underlying concern is legitimate even if the specified solution is not.

Then pray with more nerve than you have been. The promise about praying in my name was not given to make us cautious. It was given to men about to be sent into the world with nothing but the Spirit and the right to ask. What would you pray for this week if you actually believed you had the Son’s standing before the Father?

Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.

John 14:13-14, ESV