Luke 11:13

“If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?”

And all this is sure, because if we, who are evil give good gifts to our children, how much more certain can we be that our Father, God, will give us, as His children, His Holy Spirit when we ask Him. He wants us to have Him in abundance.

‘If we who are evil.' Note that we receive these things even though we are ‘evil', that is, coming short of God's glory (Romans 3:23). And that all of us are ‘evil'. (Jesus had no illusions about us). It is not of our deserving. Thus we do not have to hold back through a feeling of unworthiness.

This reference to the Holy Spirit gains especial significance in that in the body of Luke's Gospel mention of the Holy Spirit is deliberately limited so that in Luke 11:20, where Matthew 12:28 has the Spirit of God, Luke has the finger of God. In fact this is the only reference in the ministry of Jesus in the Synoptics to the general giving of the Holy Spirit before the resurrection.

What then is it referring to? We have already seen above on Luke 11:2 that ‘hallowed be your name' contains a reference to the giving of the Holy Spirit in Ezekiel 36, thus here this is confirming the fulfilment of that promise. He will give us a new heart and a new spirit. And He will continually cleans and renew them. But as with so much in the Lord's Prayer it has both a present and future reference. In one sense the present disciples can experience the Holy Spirit as their ‘daily bread' in their daily lives now, as in John 3:1; John 4:10; John 7:37, but its major fulfilment will be in John 20:22 and Acts 2 (compare John 7:38), when the Holy Spirit comes in power (compare Luke 24:49). Then they will experience Him in abundance.

It should be noted that this has nothing to do with a desperate seeking after a special blessing of the Holy Spirit. It has to do with receiving His daily blessing. It is the receiving of our daily ‘bread'. For once the Holy Spirit has come to us in His transforming and saving power, which was the first thing that all should seek, we are to ‘go on being filled with the Spirit' (Ephesians 5:18). He will be given in fuller and fuller measure. He will be a spring of water welling up to eternal life (John 4:14).