John 15:1-8
“Whatever You Wish”
May 2, 2021 – Fifth Sunday of Easter
Steven Wright, the comedian, said, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?” There’s truth in that. This past month I’ve been up and down wishing for a one-man pontoon boat for fishing. I’ve seen people use them in places like Gold Lake where I camped a couple nights last year. I was envious. So more than a month ago I found a great price at a local store and ordered one. It was supposed to be here in three days. It didn’t come, and the order just sat in limbo. After three weeks I gave up on it.
This past Tuesday I suddenly got a message saying the boat had shipped and would be here next week. Then another message came the next day saying it was here. I went to pick it up, put the seats down, and hefted a huge box into the back of our vehicle. I drove home while it slowly dawned on me I had a problem. Even disassembled, I had nowhere to store this thing. Transporting it on a camping trip would leave little room for my other gear. I left in the back of the SUV, slept on it, then sadly drove it back to the store the next day.
There are many practical reasons you can’t everything you wish for, but here’s Jesus today telling us in verse 7, “ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” A prosperity gospel preacher would take that verse, run with it, and tell you that you can have everything you wish.
I’m guessing you know better. That promise needs to be in context. Jesus did not just offer to give us whatever we ask. He put conditions on it. Verse 7 actually says, “If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” You have to abide in Jesus, whatever that means. Then you get what you wish for.
Farther down in the chapter, verse 16, there is another condition for getting what you wish. Jesus said, “the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.” In Matthew 21:22 He said “Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive.” In I John 3:22, we read “we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.” That “whatever” we wish or ask always seems to have strings attached.
So, contrary to Steven Wright, you can have everything. Jesus and the Bible say so. You just have to work on how you ask. Meet the conditions and it is all yours. Maybe you should worry about where you will put it all, just as soon as get your prayer technique right and meet the conditions. Whatever you wish is there to be had. Or is it?
A prosperity preacher might actually tell you to abide in Jesus or ask in faith or to obey God’s commands so you can get whatever you wish. But if any of that were simple or easy, Christians everywhere would be safe, prosperous and happy. Palestinian Christians would be freed from Apartheid-like conditions in Israel. Nigerian Christians would be secure from attack by Muslim militants. Central American Christians would easily find asylum in the United States. But none of that is happening. Are you and I going to tell those brothers and sisters in Christ that they don’t love Jesus or don’t have enough faith or aren’t obeying God’s commandments? I hope not.
I don’t have answers for the problems I just named for other Christians in the world. But thinking about sad stories like that may help us discover something about our own wishes and whether we are abiding in Jesus. Or maybe a story like this might help:
Three men were cast away on a desert island. After months of waiting for rescue, a bottle floated up on the beach. As they all gathered around, one of them picked it up and rubbed off the sand. Lo and behold, as he rubbed, a genie appeared! The genie was extremely grateful to be released from the bottle and announced that, as usual, he had three wishes to grant. Because there were three of them stranded on the island, they could each have one wish. The man holding the bottle immediately spoke up, “I am sick of this island. I miss my family and my friends. I want to go home.” Poof! He was gone, home to his wife and children. One of the other men said, “I feel exactly the same way. It has been too long. Please send me home.” Poof! He also was gone, home once again. The third man was left alone with the genie. He was, you might say, the slowest of the three. He looked around the now empty island, then said, “You know, it sure is lonely here without my two friends. I wish they were back.”
A moment ago, I asked you to pay attention to all of verse 7, not just the part that says you can ask for whatever you wish and get it. That’s called taking a bit of Scripture in context. But now let’s look at the larger context, that image Jesus uses to talk about abiding in Him. He said in verse 5, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Before and after that Jesus keeps saying how important it is that branches “bear fruit.”
If we are branches on a vine, then we are part of something bigger than ourselves. If we are branches on a vine, then our concern is not just with our own welfare, but with the health and fruitfulness of the whole vine. If abiding in Jesus is like being a branch of a vine, then the wishes we ask Him to fulfill need to be about more than our own individual wants and desires.
That’s why what immediately follows our text in chapter 15 is all about love. It’s why when Jesus said again that the Father would give us whatever we ask in His name, He immediately follows it in verse 17 by saying, “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
God is not a magical genie who grants whatever thoughtless, selfish wishes we might ask Him for. Our Lord might have sent the first two men on the island home, but He never would have brought them back to fulfill the wish of their companion. He thought only of himself. Abiding in Jesus and getting what you wish for begins with genuine love that makes what you wish not about yourself but about others, just like Jesus’ own wishes.
Again, I have no brilliant answers to world problems, but I’m pretty sure that we find ourselves unable to solve many of them because we have believed a lie. That lie is that things will get better and everyone will prosper if we each buy and sell and vote in ways that benefit us personally, in our own self-interest. To abide in Jesus is to believe the opposite of that: we will prosper together, and receive what we wish, when our hearts and minds are focused in love on what is good for others, good for the common good. Our wishes need to change.
Changes in what we wish are the fruit of a true relationship with Jesus Christ. God’s favorable answers to your prayers arise out of seeking the kind of relationship with Jesus that makes what you wish different. Instead of focusing on your wishes, you focus on Him.
So ask yourself, “What kind of relationship with Jesus would change what I wish for?” Jesus tells us here that it starts by recognizing that we are merely branches. Richard Foster wrote that “Nothing is more important to a life of prayer than learning how to become a branch.”[1] If the most important thing about Jesus is His love for others, then that ought to be what is most important to us.
Branches need to grow of course. We start small. All of us start with our own wishes. But we need to grow beyond that. While I was in seminary we took a car trip with another student and his wife, George and Gina. They sat in the back as I drove up front with Beth. We asked them that basic question, “How did you meet?” George began to explain how he had a wish list of qualities he wanted in the woman he would marry. He ticked them off for us, sitting there next to his wife, things like being a Christian, a good listener, intelligence, a modicum of physical attractiveness (yes, he said that), a certain taste in music, etc., etc. Then he said, “When I met Gina, she was 90% of my list. I knew I had found the one.”
I drove along, wondering what Gina was thinking as she listened to George tell us this. I had to watch the road or I would have turned around to see the expression on her face. I don’t know what she thought, or how she felt about it. What I do know is that, at some point, their marriage had to get beyond each other’s wishes and grow into a relationship, into love. George needed to put down his wish list and think about what Gina wished. He would discover that his marriage to Gina fulfilled all sorts of wishes he did not even know he had. Once he really got to know her, some of his wishes would change to match her wishes.
That’s what Jesus wants for you and me, for our relationship with Him to grow so deep and strong that what we wish changes to match what He wishes. Just as He says here in the rest of chapter 15, He wants our love for Him to grow into a love for everyone else whom He loves. That is Jesus’ wish for our wishes.
You can have whatever you wish if you abide in Jesus. But the more you abide in Jesus, the more you will find that what you really wish has less and less to do with what you wish and more and more with what others need and wish. We’re not there yet, of course. We all wish sometimes for things like boats we have no place to store and perfect spouses to whom we’d never measure up. But if we hang in there on the vine, keep learning from and wishing to be like Jesus, our wishes will look more and more like love.
One of the ways Jesus gives us to abide in Him, to remain on the vine, is like nourishment branches need from their source. So we come to His Table today, remembering how Jesus did not seek what He wished and said “Not my will, but thine” to His Father. Then He laid down His life and His wishes. He let His body be broken and His blood shed for you and for me. It’s the love in that body and blood which grows His vine. We branch from that vine of love. Let it be that same vine from which our wishes and our prayers grow.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), p. 195.