So...I can pray and believe that God will give me a brand new GT350, a 4 car garage and an unlimited credit line to American Muscle...and God will give it to me? COOL! I'll get right on that!
Jesus said those words to His disciples after He spent years teaching them. He taught quite a bit about material things, against the love of money, for example. Btw, I'm assuming American Muscle is some kind of hot rod thing, btw.
James says you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to fulfill your lusts.
God does answer prayers for our material needs. My wife is a prayer warrior. (To bad we don't have a term like prayer-er in English.) During our years of scraping by in grad school, she prayed for an I-Pad. We helped a Japanese man move when he went back to Japan and he gave me $500 at the airport and asked me to buy my wife an I-Pad so our wives could Facetime each other. On another occasion, my wife misplaced her phone and started praying to get an I-phone so she could use an app as a remote control for a camera she wanted to use for ministry. She thought she might have accidently thrown it away and asked me to help her look in the dumpster at our apartment. In the dumpster was an I-phone 5. It cranked right up. She found a picture on there from someone in the apartment and contacted her about it. The young woman said it had water damage and that my wife could have it.
Once, before moving to grad school in an expensive place where consumer goods are expensive, my shoes broke. The soul cracked in a weird way that would hurt my foot. We had to move everything on an airplane. I managed to find some old shoes to wear to move. But I told the Lord He knew how expensive things were where I was going and I'd be in grad school, and I didn't have a job. So I asked Him to provide me some brand new shoes at a thrift store that were really cheap. So we arrive there, staying in a temporary condo, and one day we were not going to go out apartment shopping. There was a thrift store open certain days next door. I didn't know it, but they weren't supposed to be open that day. I think told my wife I was going to go out and buy those new shoes I prayed for. That's what I was looking for.
I went next door and I saw a box outside of the thrift store with some nice white shoes on top from a distance. I thought to myself, "I think those are my new shoes." As I walked up and saw the brand new shoes, I thought, "I just need to make sure they are ten and a halfs". They were New Balance. Of course, they were. I went in the store and asked the woman behind the counter how much they cost. She said normally, they would be $14, But she was having a sale on shoes and they were $2. She said the man who brought them in said he tried them and didn't like them. He'd brought it another pair that had been sold that had an $80 price tag on them. It's a good thing they were sold because I was carting lots of boxes back and forth between temporary condos until we got a lease on an apartment, and I didn't need more stuff.
Over a months ago, before moving back here, with a PhD, but unemployed, I went to part of an all-night prayer meeting with my wife (a meeting that went on for days). She told me that sister so and so had just given her $400. I prayed in my heart, "Lord, I'd like someone to give me $400."
There was a woman at the meeting who didn't have a car who was there with her teenage son who didn't have school the next day. We went to church together (a different church.) She'd been helping clean our apartment, and I was actually thinking of blessing her with some money. I knew she and her husband didn't have lots of money. After I took her home, she said 'we'd' discussed it and she wanted to give me some money and put $400 into my hand. I thought about turning it down, but when I saw that it was $400, the amount I'd prayed for, I didn't want to reject the Lord's answer to my prayer, and I wanted her and her husband to have the blessing of giving. Of course, we could use the money, too.
I don't care for people asking for tens of millions of dollars to buy airplanes so they can fly around in style as 'King's Kids'. But asking for provision is something we are supposed to do.
