Verse of the day · October 2
What does "believe that ye receive them" mean in Mark 11:24?
The curse was only that no one would eat from it again. By morning it was dried up from the roots.
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Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.
Mark 11:24
Jesus had spent the night at Bethany, with friends who were glad to have him under their roof. His work lay in Jerusalem, and he was so intent on it that he left in the morning without breakfast; before he had gone far along the road he was hungry. A fig tree stood some way ahead of him at the side of the road, in leaf. A fig tree carries its fruit before it carries its leaves, so a tree in leaf like that was making a claim that there was fruit underneath. The Passover was five days off, and the gathering of figs did not begin until then, so nobody could say the tree's fruit had been picked already and carried off. He went over, and for all the leaves there was not so much as one fig on it.
So he spoke to the tree: No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. To curse, here, does not mean to find fault with a thing; it means to hand it over to destruction, and he had not done it out of temper at being disappointed. The disciples heard him say it, and they took notice. The tree may stand for anyone in the same condition: a man whose religion is all outward show, who talks of good works and does none.
That evening, going back out to Bethany, they passed the same tree. It was probably dark by then, and they did not see it. Nobody watched the thing happen. It went in a night. Next morning, coming along the road again, they saw it. Not the small branches only: the trunk, the roots, all of it dried up, so that the tree was entirely dead and there was no expecting it ever to come back. Peter remembered what had been said and came out with it in surprise: Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away. What happened went past what Jesus had said, down to the roots; more is often included in a curse of his than is put into words. If it was to bear no fruit, it would not be left with leaves to cheat people.
The disciples could not account for how a tree had withered that fast. What struck them was the power and authority in a word of command. Have faith in God, he said. A living, active faith would put as great a power as that into their own praying. That comes to a strong belief, after what they had just seen, that God is able to do what looks most difficult with infinite ease. A faith like that is God's own work, a free gift of his grace. It rests on God himself: the assured trust a man has in him. What they are told to do with a gift like that is use it.
That faith is not for the drying up of a fig tree only, but for things much greater. The next thing he named was a mountain — the mount of Olives, which they were at or near. Whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea, and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. The sea he meant was the sea of Galilee, the nearest one, and even that was many miles off. A man saying that has to have something from God for his faith to stand on — some word God has spoken, general or particular — and what he believes is going to happen is measured by what God has actually said.
The men listening were given a faith that did wonders in the natural world — the sick healed, the dead raised, evil spirits driven out — and that was the removing of mountains in effect. The same promise may be read of mountains of another sort, which any true Christian has in himself. Guilt is one: faith casts it into the depths of the sea, never to rise up in judgment against him again. Another is the corruption in his own heart: faith makes it flat ground in front of the grace of God.
What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them, he said. Receive, in the present tense — and the tense is deliberate: it is there to show the certainty of the thing, and that it will indeed be performed. You would expect it to say believe that you will receive them; what it says is believe that ye receive them, and the one who says ye shall have them is the one with the power to give them.
That tense will not stretch as far as it is often pulled. It cannot mean that the things are in a man's hands before they arrive; nobody can believe he already has what he has not got, and to say so would be a contradiction in terms. What is asked of him is that he be as certain of getting them as a man who had them already. And a limit sits on what may be desired in the first place: the things asked for are the things that agree with what God has made known of his will, the things that would get his gospel believed, and the things that make for the glory of his name. This encouragement was aimed especially at prayer for what is above the power of nature, of a miraculous kind.
One more condition arrives in the very next breath after the promise. And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any. What is required is that a man freely forgive anyone who has done him an injury and hold no malice against anybody, and that forgiving is a necessary qualification of the prayer that gets through. At prayer he has his enemies to pray for too, and he cannot sincerely ask God to do a man good while he is wishing him ill. If it comes into his mind while he is praying that someone has wronged him, he is not to lay the complaint before God and call for the man to answer for it; he is to forgive it there and then, in his own heart, though the man is absent and has not asked him to. His forgiving is not the price of his own pardon, which comes through the blood of Christ and out of the riches of God's grace. That forgiving describes the sort of man who may look for pardon.
Nothing the disciples did brought that tree down. They had heard a sentence passed on it, walked past it that evening without knowing, and come back in the light to find the sentence had held. The certainty they were asked for in their own praying was of that kind: not confidence in their own asking, but assurance about the one being asked — his power, his goodness, his truth, his faithfulness — and it reached no further than what God had actually said. Ask on something God has actually said. Ask it with nothing held against anybody. Ask it as surely as if the thing were already in hand. The tree had nothing for the hungry man who came to it. What it yielded was everything he taught them from it.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes, Albert Barnes and B. W. Johnson. How these teachings are made