Jesus’s least-believed teaching.

I tell you the truth, anyone who believes in Me will do the same works I have done, and even greater works, because I am going to be with the Father. You can ask for anything in My name, and I will do it, so that the Son can bring glory to the Father. Yes, ask Me for anything in My name, and I will do it!

—Jesus, John 13.12-14 NLT

When Christians proclaim this saying of Jesus’s, we immediately get blowback from other Christians who, to be honest, don’t believe Jesus really meant it when He said it. They don’t come right out and say they don’t believe Jesus meant it. Instead they teach that this verse is a booby trap: It’s rigged so that nobody can actually achieve the conditions for it to work.

First of all, Jesus taught that it works for “anyone who believes in Me.” (Jn 14.12) Well, there’s your problem right there: The people who pray for stuff in Jesus’s name don’t really believe in Him. Not enough. There’s some doubt in them. Might be a tiny, tiny amount of doubt—doubt as small as a mustard seed—but it’s just enough doubt to nullify this entire promise. There has to be absolutely none. We have to have the utter, entire, blind faith of small children who believe anything that adults tell them.

The flaw in this teaching is that small children do have this sort of absolute, doubt-free faith. When children hear this verse, they immediately believe it and give it a shot: They pray for impossible things. If the above interpretation were true, then okay, this verse may not work for adults, but it should automatically work for little kids. But it doesn’t always. So… what’s the deal?

Ah, that’s where we get to booby-trap number 2: Jesus taught that we can ask for whatever we want in His name “so that the Son can bring glory to the Father.” (Jn 14.13) There’s the catch. If it doesn’t bring God glory, He’s not gonna do it. And if you look at our average prayer requests, you might notice that more than a few of them are a bit self-centered (“God, help me out”) —so what good does that do Him? Doesn’t look like much. So for that reason, God will give our prayer requests a pass. They don’t bring Him glory. There’s too much selfishness in them; too much make-me-look-good and not enough make-You-look-good. Or they’re just silly or trivial, like the prayer requests of small children. Don’t bother with those.

Booby-trap number 3 is the cessationist interpretation of this verse: Jesus did mean it, but only in the first century, to the first-century disciples. It doesn’t count for the twenty-first. We don’t need miracles anyway; we have the bible, which is enough of a miracle for anyone. And even though most Christians are not cessationists, more than a few of us have taken the attitude that yeah, maybe Jesus was only talking to His earliest disciples at that time, and not us—and while they certainly performed quite a lot of the very same miracles Jesus did, we won’t necessarily be so successful, ’cause something changed between then and now. We’re just not entirely sure what that was.

What that was, was a whole lot of Christians taking these wrong interpretations, running with them, and as a result making them true. We think our lack of faith makes this promise impossible; so we consider this promise impossible and choose to lack faith. We think our requests have to produce the fruit of glory to God in order to be asked in the first place—even though we don’t know the future, and have a sucky track record at guessing it, particularly when it comes to the things of God, so how can we know whether our requests won’t produce glory to God? Heck, the gory death of Jesus, of all things, produced glory to God; how are we to know what might produce His glory or not? But we presume our requests just won’t, so we don’t ask them, so we never find out one way or the other. We just preemptively assume they won’t.

If you don’t ask, you don’t get. But we assume we won’t get, so we just don’t ask.

Jesus essentially says three times in this passage—and swears to it by saying “Amen amen” (translated in the KJV as “verily verily” and in the NLT as “I tell you the truth”)—that we can do as He did. He says we’ll do greater than He did; He says we can ask anything in His name; He says again we can ask anything in His name. The emphasis in this teaching is definitely, “ASK ME FOR ANYTHING.” It is not, “…If you’re perfect.”

But that’s the way we interpret it: We have to be doubt-free and be able to accurately predict whether our requests will glorify God. We have to be perfect like Jesus before we can do amazing stuff like Jesus. Of course Jesus could do all those miracles; He was perfect. Us, not so much.

The end result? People don’t ask God for stuff. And then our interpretation becomes self-fulfilling: God doesn’t answer most prayer requests. (Because we never make those prayer requests.)

Well, here I challenge you to take Him at face value. He said we can do as He did. Are you willing to do as He did? Or are you happy to stay where you are?