In Jesus' Name, Cluck Like a Chicken

Did Jesus really hand His followers a blank check, signed and ready to cash any time they want His power?

Plenty of people believe He did, and they can quote the verse.

“If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.”

John 14:14 (ESV)

Anything. Ask for the healing, the job, the house, close the prayer with “in Jesus’ name,” and the thing is supposed to arrive. When it does not arrive, the fault must lie with the one who asked, who did not believe hard enough or speak with enough authority. The name becomes a magic word, said over the problem like a stage hypnotist’s cue.

Read by itself, the verse does look like a blank check. Read alone is exactly the trouble. A verse taken out of context becomes a pretext: a respectable reason offered to cover what the asker wanted all along.

So what does “in my name” mean?

In My Father’s Name

Jesus used the phrase about Himself before He ever gave it to anyone else.

“I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him.”

John 5:43 (ESV)

He said it in Jerusalem, to religious leaders who wanted Him dead. He had healed a man on the Sabbath, the weekly day of rest, when in their eyes even carrying a sleeping mat was forbidden work (John 5:10). Worse, He had called God His own Father, and they heard in it a claim to be equal with God (John 5:16-18). He did not take the claim back. He explained how it worked: He had no authority of His own to act on.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.”

John 5:19 (ESV)

A few sentences later He says it again, more plainly still: “I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 5:30).

That is what coming in the Father’s name meant. In the ancient world, to come in someone’s name was to come as their agent. A servant who spoke in his master’s name carried his master’s authority, and he carried it for his master’s business. The nearest modern parallel is a power of attorney. It lets you sign for another person, and the signature is fully valid, as long as you act in their interest. Use it to pay yourself and the same signature becomes fraud. (A name in Scripture carries far more than a label; What’s In a Name? traces how much.)

Jesus came with the Father’s full authority and used none of it for Himself. Then, on the evening He rose from the dead, He handed the same arrangement to His disciples.

“As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

John 20:21 (ESV)

They go in His name the way He came in the Father’s: as representatives, carrying real authority, on business that is not their own. To ask in Jesus’ name is to ask what Jesus would ask, for the reason He would ask it. The phrase at the end of a prayer is a statement about whose errand the prayer is on.

Read the Next Line

John 14:14 has neighbors. The sentence just before it reads:

“Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”

John 14:13 (ESV)

The promise arrives with its purpose attached. Jesus answers so that the Father is glorified. The sentence just after the promise turns to the one doing the asking:

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

John 14:15 (ESV)

Jesus kept talking that night, and every time He came back to the promise, the condition came with it in the same breath.

“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”

John 15:7 (ESV)

Meno, the Greek word behind “abide,” means to stay, to remain, to make your home somewhere. “Whatever you wish” is in the verse. So is the condition, and the condition comes first.

John heard those words at the table. Decades later he wrote a letter to the churches, and he stated the condition without any poetry at all:

“And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.”

1 John 5:14 (ESV)

James, the brother of Jesus, named what happens when the condition is ignored:

“You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”

James 4:3 (ESV)

Line the conditions up and they can look like fine print, the clause that takes back what the headline gave. Read them again. Abide in me. Let my words abide in you. Love me. Keep my commandments. Ask according to His will. Ask so the Father is glorified. None of these is a task to finish before the request goes through. They describe a person: someone who stays close to Jesus, whose mind is soaked in what He said, who loves Him, and who wants what the Father wants.

A person like that asks for different things. The conditions change the one asking long before they touch the answer. That is how “whatever” survives intact. The promise does not shrink. The one asking grows.

Jesus I Know, and Paul I Recognize

Paul spent more than two years in Ephesus, teaching daily (Acts 19:8-10), and God worked through him in ways Luke, the author of Acts, calls extraordinary.

“And God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick, and their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.”

Acts 19:11-12 (ESV)

Luke is careful with his subject. God was doing the miracles. Paul’s hands were only where they happened.

Ephesus was a city that ran on magic. When the new believers there later burned their books of spells, the pile was worth fifty thousand pieces of silver (Acts 19:19). In a market like that, a name that worked was valuable, and some traveling exorcists decided to add this one to their stock.

“Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, ‘I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.’ Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. But the evil spirit answered them, ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?’ And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.”

Acts 19:13-16 (ESV)

To adjure is to command under oath, on the authority of a name. They had the name exactly right. They even had a reference: the Jesus whom Paul proclaims. They were missing everything else. They did not abide in Him. His words did not live in them. They were not seeking the Father’s glory; they were running a business. Every condition beside every promise was absent, and the spirit could tell. “Who are you?” is the same verdict Jesus gives at the judgment to the people who did mighty works in His name and whom He never knew (Matthew 7:22-23).

The hypnotist says the word, and the volunteer from the third row flaps his elbows and clucks like a chicken. The sons of Sceva expected the same obedience from a demon. They said the word. Nothing clucked. The men giving the orders were the ones who ran into the street, stripped and bleeding.

“And this became known to all the residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks. And fear fell upon them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled.”

Acts 19:17 (ESV)

The name was honored at the very moment it refused to be used. (Power wielded under someone else’s name is an old story; Borrowed Power traces the devil’s version of it.)

Not As I Will

Every condition leads back to one: the will of the Father. Jesus taught His disciples to pray for it before they prayed for anything else. In the prayer He gave them, “your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” comes before “give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:10-11). He had already lived that order in Jerusalem, seeking no will but the Father’s.

On the night He promised “anything,” He prayed “your will be done” at the highest cost there is.

John 14 was spoken at supper, on the last night before the cross. After supper Jesus led His disciples across the Kidron Valley to a garden called Gethsemane. There He made a request of His own. He fell on His face and asked the Father for one thing, and He asked it three times.¹

“My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

Matthew 26:39 (ESV)

The cup was no figure of speech to Him. The prophets used it for the wrath of God, poured out and drunk to the dregs (Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15). Jesus knew what was in it, and He asked not to drink it.

The cup did not pass. The one who promised “anything in my name” asked, with perfect faith and perfect standing before the Father, and the answer was no.

No one can say Jesus did not believe hard enough. No one can say He asked with hidden sin or a careless confession. If the blank-check reading of John 14:14 were true, Gethsemane could not have happened. So when a sick man is told he was not healed because his faith was too small, the garden answers for him.

The garden answers a quieter accusation too, the one a refused prayer whispers: He must not love me. Only hours before, still on the city side of the Kidron, Jesus had prayed to the Father who “loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). That love was older than the world, and the refusal in the garden left it whole. Whatever a no from the Father means, Gethsemane rules out one reading of it: that He has stopped loving the one who asked.

The story kept going past the no. The cup He asked to escape, He drank the next day on the cross, and that refused request is the reason anyone can come to the Father at all. The Father’s no to His Son became His yes to everyone who comes.

Sometimes the Answer Is No

The apostles lived under the same rule.

Paul had something he called “a thorn … in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7). He never says what it was, and no one since has settled it. He does say what he did about it.

“Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

2 Corinthians 12:8-9 (ESV)

Three times, the same count as in the garden. The answer was no, and it came with a reason. The word for power is dunamis, the same word the Gospels use for the mighty works of Jesus. Paul received the power. It came through the thorn, and the thorn stayed.

Then there is Timothy, the younger man Paul trained and called “my true child in the faith” (1 Timothy 1:2). Paul left him in charge of the church at Ephesus (1 Timothy 1:3), the same city where cloths from Paul’s skin had carried healing to the sick. Timothy was often ill, and Paul wrote to him about it.

“No longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.”

1 Timothy 5:23 (ESV)

No handkerchief. No instruction to claim his healing in Jesus’ name. Paul sent practical advice for a stomach that kept failing and ailments that kept returning. He did not treat Timothy’s stomach as proof of weak faith, any more than he treated his own thorn that way.

Sometimes the answer is no, and the promise survives it intact, because it always read “according to his will.” Sometimes His will is grace enough to carry what He chooses to leave in place.

No Longer I

So did Jesus hand His followers a blank check? He gave them something a blank check could never be.

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Galatians 2:20 (ESV)

A blank check puts one person’s signature under another person’s wishes. Two parties stay in the arrangement, and the whole point of the check is that the one holding it gets to choose. Paul describes Christ living in the one who asks. The asker’s wishes and the signer’s will become one will. That is what “in my name” meant from the start: Christ asking, through someone He lives in, with the phrase at the end of the prayer naming who is really speaking.

The one instruction tucked inside the largest promise is three words long: abide in me. Stay near Him. Let His words make their home in you. Ask for anything, and pray the way He prayed in the garden. The fruit grows from the vine, and the Father is glorified in it.

“By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.”

John 15:8 (ESV)

It is the same purpose Jesus attached to the promise in the first place: “that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”

And when the answer you receive is no, remember who else heard that answer. The Father refused the Son He had loved before the world began, and He did not love Him one bit less for it. Remember, too, what the no in Gethsemane bought. The cup did not pass, and the one who asked went to the cross. Every request made in His name since that night rests on the one request the Father refused. The name is not a magic word. It belongs to the Son of God, “who loved me and gave himself for me.”

References

• The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV). Crossway, 2001.

Footnotes