Be Specific

Be Specific

What do you want me to do for you? Mark 10:51

A BLIND BEGGAR SITTING by the side of the road was shouting at Jesus, and the crowd kept telling him to be quiet. But when people are desperate for help, they don’t exactly listen to crowds. So Bartimaeus kept making a scene, more interested in his healing than his dignity. Eventually, Jesus turned his attention to the noisemaker and asked him a pointed question: “What do you want me to do?”

Jesus, who often saw clearly into people’s hearts, asked a question anyone in the crowd could have answered. When a blind man is screaming for mercy, he obviously wants to receive his sight. Jesus wasn’t blind to Bartimaeus’s blindness, but he still wanted the prayer to be voiced. Bartimaeus had to make a request more specific than “Have mercy.”

A principle of prayer is that faith comes before sight. With Bartimaeus, this was literally true. But a specific request had to come first. This passage from Mark teaches us a lot about prayer, including another lesson on the validity of being bold in our requests just as we’ve seen elsewhere in Scripture—earnest pleas, pushing through crowds, abandoning decorum, not taking no for an answer when we know our desire is within Jesus’ power and will to answer, and “bothering” him with our shameless persistence. But we also learn that Jesus wants us to articulate our desires. He wants our prayers to be specific questions aimed at a specific response. He gets much more glory from fulfilling a particular desire than from showing general mercy in response to a general request. He wants us to recognize what he has done.

We don’t always know what kind of answers to expect from God, when they will come, or how he will go about fulfilling our petitions. But when we have something specific in mind, he wants us to express it. Desire is not enough. It’s a prompt, not a request. Hope is not enough. It’s the expectancy we have in the process, not the means to an end. Prayer involves asking, and asking involves having an idea of what we want to happen. We submit that to God’s will, but we still expect good things. If we want him to answer specifically, we have to ask specifically.

Many things are lost for want of asking.