Why Does God Want Us to Ask When He Already Knows?

There’s a beautiful tension in Scripture about prayer that used to puzzle me until I saw the heart behind it.

One verse commands us: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17).
Another declares, “You have not because you ask not” (James 4:2).
And then Jesus calmly assures us, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him” (Matt. 6:8).
We’re also told to let our requests be made known to God—with thanksgiving (Phil. 4:6).

So which is it? If the Father already knows, why do we have to say it out loud? Why not just quietly trust that He’ll handle it?

I used to think asking was almost a lack of faith, as if I was nagging an omniscient God who obviously had it covered. But the longer I walk with Him, the more I’m convinced that the invitation to ask isn’t primarily about informing God of anything. It’s about connecting our hearts to His.

Think about it in family terms. A good father usually knows exactly what his kids need, and sometimes long before they do. Yet as those kids grow, he often waits for them to voice the need. Why? Because constantly jumping in with preemptive provision can quietly breed entitlement. “Of course Dad will fix it. He always does.” The relationship stays shallow, transactional. I get, He gives, I stay happy, He stays useful.

But love isn’t looking for a vending machine. Love is looking for communion.

When we bring our needs, dreams, fears, and even our selfish wants to God in prayer, we’re doing something far more significant than placing an order. We’re opening the door of our lives and saying, “Come in. I need You. Not just Your stuff, but You.” Asking keeps us humble. It keeps pride from growing in the dark corners of self-sufficiency. It keeps entitlement from convincing us the world revolves around our comfort.

And here’s the wild part! God will even let us ask stupid, selfish, rebellious things, just to keep the conversation alive.

Remember the prodigal son? That boy basically walked up to his dad and essentially said, “I wish you were dead. Give me my inheritance now.” It’s hard to imagine a more greedy, insulting, rebellious request. Any human father in his right mind would have said no!

But the father in Jesus’ story? He grants the request anyway.

He divides the estate, hands the boy the cash, and lets him walk. Why? Because love refuses to force relationship. Love honors the terrifying gift of free will, even when it’s used to run in the opposite direction. The father knew exactly how the story would end, but he still waited for his son to voice the desire, even a wicked one.

Years later James would write, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:3). That’s true. Motives matter. But notice that Jesus showed us the Father’s heart long before James gave us the warning. The Father’s first instinct isn’t to shut down selfish prayers with a lightning bolt. His first instinct is to let us talk, because He’s after the connection more than the correction.

So yes, keep praying without ceasing.
Yes, ask boldly, specifically, honestly.
Yes, rest in the fact that He already knows.

Because every time we open our mouths (or even groan without words), we’re giving the Father what He’s wanted from the beginning: us.

Not our perfection.
Not our polished performance.
Just us, all needy, broken, hopeful, and talking.

And a Father like that, I’ll keep asking for the rest of my life.

- Bill Vanderbush

Scaling Love

Socialism, in its purest form, is indeed the economic structure of a loving family. Parents (the providers) work, sacrifice, and allocate resources not according to strict merit or output, but according to need. The toddler gets fed even though he contributes nothing; the teenager going through a growth spurt gets larger portions; the elderly grandparent receives care long after she can no longer produce. No one keeps a ledger. No one resents the “net consumers” because unbreakable bonds of love transform self-sacrifice into joy rather than grievance. The family works as a miniature socialist commonwealth because affection is infinite, information is perfect (parents intuitively know who is truly needy versus lazy), and exit is almost impossible—you don’t “divorce” your deadbeat brother or needy child without shattering your own identity.

Scale that same system beyond the ring of intimate love and everything breaks.

1. The Love Problem


Sacrificial compassion is not a scalable resource because eventually you sacrifice to death. Oxytocin doesn’t flood your brain when you contemplate the needs of 330 million strangers the way it does when your own child cries. God seems to have wired us for intense care inside the tribe of roughly 150 people we can know personally and for wary reciprocity or indifference beyond it. Socialism asks us to treat distant strangers with the same selfless devotion we show our children. That is psychologically unnatural for the overwhelming majority of human beings. Charity remains possible at scale; forced pseudo-familial obligation does not.

2. The Information Problem


Inside a family, providers have near-perfect information. A mother knows whether her teenager is genuinely depressed or just binge-watching TikTok. At the scale of a nation-state, central planners (or even voters) have almost zero reliable knowledge about millions of individual circumstances. The result is a system that rewards the loudest sob stories, the most skilled political operators, and the best forgers of disability claims, while quietly punishing quiet competence and unreported struggle.

3. The Incentive Problem


In a family, social pressure and love keep free-riding within bounds. Your deadbeat cousin might crash on the couch for two weeks, not two decades, because eventually even Grandma will say something. In a large-scale socialist system, the providers and the dependents rarely inhabit the same social circles. The provider class pays taxes into a faceless bureaucracy; the dependent class receives benefits from the same faceless bureaucracy. Shame evaporates. Resentment festers. The tragedy of the commons in human effort appears: everyone has an incentive to exaggerate their need and minimize their contribution, because the costs are diffused across millions of strangers they will never meet and the benefits are concentrated on themselves and their immediate circle.

4. The Selection Problem
 Over Time


Here is the cruelest part: systems that reward dependency and punish (or fail to adequately reward) provision selectively breed for more dependents and fewer providers. Over generations, the responsible ants subsidize the grasshoppers until there aren’t enough ants left to carry the load. You see it in shrinking labor-force participation rates, exploding disability rolls, and cultures where “working class” increasingly means “formerly working class.” The family doesn’t face this problem because children eventually grow up and (in healthy families) become providers themselves. National socialism has no such built-in maturation mechanism.

5. The Coercion Problem


A family is held together by voluntary love. When love fails, the family fractures painfully but peacefully. State socialism is held together by coercion—taxes collected at gunpoint, borders controlled by force, dissent criminalized as “wrecking” or “hoarding” or “hate speech.” The moment you replace voluntary giving with taking, you have already admitted that the familial model cannot scale. You are no longer running on love; you are running on fear.

In short: socialism works in families because families run on love, perfect information, unbreakable bonds, and tiny scale. Outside those conditions it becomes a machine that slowly converts human beings into political capital, responsibility into resentment, and citizens into competing factions of entitled dependents screaming at a shrinking pool of exhausted providers. The proof is not in theory but in the graveyard of 20th-century experiments and the slow-motion crisis of every generous welfare state watching its productive base erode while its promises expand.

Family does not scale without love. That is the entire story.

Deconstruction and Reconstruction Revisited

Deconstruction in its rawest form is easy.

It requires no apprenticeship. It only needs frustration and a target. Reconstruction, however, is carpentry for the soul. It demands calloused knees, a steady hand, and the humility to measure twice before you cut. When you deconstruct with the intent to rebuild, the process changes. You don’t demolish the load-bearing beams just because they’re scarred. You test them. You ask, “Does this still carry weight? Does it point me to Christ or merely to nostalgia?”

Deconstruction without reconstruction is spiritual arson. You burn the house down, walk away, and call it freedom. But winter comes, and you’re left shivering in the charred foundation.

Reconstruction is slower, messier, humbler. You salvage nails bent by bad theology and straighten them for new beams. You invite carpenters older and wiser (Paul, Athanasius, Basil, Julian, Maximus, Clement, Guyon) who know the process. You pray the Psalms while you work, because vulnerable lament and honest praise both belong in the blueprint.

When the sawdust settles, two things remain: something timeless and something deeply personal.

The timeless is the Gospel stripped down to Jesus, crucified and risen, offering grace to enemies and friends alike. It’s communion shared across denominations because the table is bigger than our tribes.

Re-identified

The Greek word hamartia (“sin” in English Bibles) literally means “missing the mark,” but its deeper etymology carries an even more startling image which is, “without form, without identity, without a fixed center.” It is the formless void where a person should be.

When John the Baptist declares, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), he is not just announcing the removal of moral infractions. He is proclaiming a cosmic re-identification project. Jesus is not subtracting a list of failures. He is imprinting form onto the formless, etching identity into the erased, breathing a name into the nameless.

Every human being walks around with a cracked mirror for a soul. We see fragments (addict, failure, orphan, traitor, victim, sinner) but never the whole. Hamartia is the fracture itself. And Jesus does not come with a broom to sweep up the shards. He comes with blood that seals.

“He was pierced for our transgressions…and by His wounds we are made whole.” (Isaiah 53:5)

The Greek verb airō (“takes away”) means to lift up and carry off. Think of a shepherd lifting up a lamb that has wandered into a briar patch and has become tangled, wounded, bleeding, unrecognizable. He does not scold the thorns out of its wool. He lifts the lamb onto His shoulders and walks it home. The lamb arrives not as “former stray,” but as known, named, belonging. This is why Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation! The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Cor 5:17) Not merely an improved creation. New creation! Your old identity (hamartia) was never an identity at all.

You were never just “forgiven.” You were re-identified. The eternal God who is Spirit became form so we (the formless) could finally recognize ourselves in Him.