The next night the incident was repeated. By the third night the cabbie became suspicious. He happened to notice a supermarket and a drug store across the way, and the thought that his fare just might be casing the place for a holdup entered his mind. So he said to the man, "I need some cigarettes; I'll be right back." While in the store he called the police. The police arrived shortly after and they asked the man why he came night after night to this particular corner.

The man pointed to a window in the Myers Park United Methodist Church, a gorgeous, beautifully back-lighted stained glass window. He said, "I never had much religion. I didn't even know how to pray. My wife is very sick, and the doctors tell me she is real bad. But then I found this window. Something about its light gives me strength and peace, and somehow looking at it I have the words to pray."

What that man prayed I do not know. The words which came to him are really incidental. But that he received his answer in the peace and strength he found I do believe. That strength and peace is the gift of God Himself. And the asking was simply being present to the presence and power of God -- the Holy Spirit -- of which that man was reminded in the sight of that window.

To pray is not necessarily as we think of prayer -- the formulation of words which seek to influence God. Prayer has more to do with our recognition of a Power greater than our own. That is the asking. That is the seeking. That is the knocking.

Which brings us to an issue which we have skirted long enough. Why is such asking and seeking and knocking necessary at all? Why would God limit Himself in giving what God has to give by insisting that we first ask? Why doesn't God simply just give? The answer is only in what has been revealed to us. God, for God's own reason, makes Himself dependent upon us to get His work accomplished. In the words of Meister Eckert, "God can as little do without us as we without Him. God invites ... we respond."

That is the thought George Eliot must have had when she placed these words into the mouth of the renowned violin maker, Antonia Stradivarius:

When a master holds twixt chin and hand a violin of mine, he will be glad that Stradivarius lived, made violins, and made them the best ...

For while God gives them skill, I give them instruments to play upon, God choosing me to help Him.... If my hand should slack, I should rob God -- since He is the fullest goodness -- leaving a blank instead of violins. for He could not make Antonia Stradivan violins without Antonia.

(Quoted from a sermon by John Claypool, "Asking the God Who Already Knows")

And neither does God choose to give what God has to give unless we ask, seek, knock. From the beginning of time it is clear that God never intended a "solo operation." The joy which God found in giving life is part of what God wanted to share. Thus God resolved that what He offered would only be finished in concert with others.

That is the reason our asking and seeking and knocking is so crucial. It is the opening God needs to get God's work done through us, and it is the conduit which makes available to us what God has to give. God will never force His will upon us. Our spirits must first be receptive. The asking, you see, is not so much for what we want as it is for what God wills.

And that is where the last verse of our text, which seems strangely out of place, finds meaning. "In everything do unto others what you would have them do to you, for this is the sum of the Law and the Prophets."

It is also the sum of God's will. It represents not only the way we are to relate to each other but also the way we would that God would relate to us.

Who of us appreciates another person forcing his or her will upon us? We neither care for persons like that, nor for "gods" like that. God treats us the way He calls us to treat one another. At the center of prayer is what is at the center of any relationship -- the willingness to receive what the other has to give.

God has Himself to give. Our asking, seeking and knocking is for nothing other than God.