Over decades of asking this question, one of the very few straight answers I got from a Christian argued exactly that — that in the last 2000-odd years, nobody we’ve ever heard of has had a speck of faith.
Asking in Jesus’ name is asking with the full authority of Jesus. This is because when it is done in this way it is Jesus (child of God) asking though you (child of God). God is one, so one child of God is any other child of God, so Jesus is you in such a asking.
You are talking about the time where God was training Moses to stand up to Pharaoh with God’s power. The goal of this seemed pretty clear, not to do parlor tricks but to train His servant Moses. Likewise Jesus in the water into wine.
What you have is Jesus outright refusing such requests for displays of power to Satan (tempted in the desert) and the pharisees who requested a sign.
It is all motivation of the heart that God uses.
I think I heard once that God has command over the Earth and humans have command over themselves, so God tends to interfere in the “Acts of God” category and that his ‘interference’ with humans is generally regulated things like health or the senses, not their actual decisions. Furthermore, God is less likely to grant your ‘prayer’ if it means the harm of another.
But usually I hear/read that God is an observer to the world and that the world is ours. There is little point in humanity if we depended on God for the most important (or insignificant) things all the time. A degree of pain has to exist if there is a ‘purpose’ to life at all. You can’t know one without knowing the other.
I don’t really care if God exists or not. My allegiance is to humanity. (Maybe that’s why a minyan is ten men?) Prayer is a way of being introspective and conscious of your actions - in fact, if I remember correctly, a root word for prayer in Hebrew is ‘inspect’. If you are praying for something really hard, you’re forced to figure out why you deserve/don’t deserve this request and what it is you have to do to get there. There’s a saying that ‘God helps those who help themselves’, and I think non-believers forget that part: God is not a genie in a bottle, and if He exists, He owes you very little.
To add: “Free will” means that we’re not Godbots. Without Free Will, there is no justice, gratitude, pain, pleasure, relationships…
I don’t recall I’ve ever said that God doesn’t interfere with natural law, nor could I ever. I firmly believe that miracles have occurred in the past and continue occurring today.
First, Jesus said that as the ‘then’ portion of an if-then statement.
Second, Jesus spoke with the standard devices that humans of all times and places have always used, such as metaphor, simile, allusion, overstatement, understatement, humor, sarcasm, and so forth. Consequently if you take everything that Jesus said and interpret it literally, you’ll end up looking like someone who challenges William Blake fans to demonstrate that tigers are actually on fire or insists that Robert Burns fans actually take roses as sex partners.
Thirdly, Jesus used common sense and expected his followers to do so, in this circumstance and many others. Consider, for comparison’s sake, that today I told my calculus students: “If you have any questions, come by my office and I’ll answer them.” Obviously there are some questions my students have which I can’t or won’t answer, such as “What will be the winning lottery numbers tomorrow?” or “How much does Britney Spears weigh?” Fortunately my students are intelligent and thus capable of parsing what I told them in a sensible way. Jesus likewise expected his followers to be intelligent and parse his statements in sensible ways.
The rightness or wrongness of it isn’t the question; it’s that Jesus specifically said that anyone who tries to put God to the test by demanding a supernatural sign will not get a supernatural sign. (Much as I, also, would not put up with my calculus students testing me in class, because I’m the authority and they’re the students, not the other way around.)
That is irrelevant. Jesus didn’t promise to do whatever Satan wanted. He DID promise to grant whatever believers prayed for.
Besides, “parlor tricks” are a red herring. You know that there are millions of devout Christians praying every day for unselfish, important things – curing their children of disease, etc. And you know that there is no discernible difference in the cure rates of such children. And as others have noted, there are no reports whatever of amputees growing new limbs.
How do you explain this, other than admitting that the promise he made was false?
Best cite EVER.
Sorry; I thought the OP was asking for opinions/thought processes on the subject. Didn’t realize I was in General Q. 
No, he didn’t. The statement ( “ALL THINGS WHATSOEVER YE ASK IN PRAYER, BELIEVING, YE SHALL RECEIVE”) contains the only condition he required, namely belief.
This is not a verse about beasts with seven heads; he said believers would be able to kill trees, and he demonstrated that he meant it literally, by doing it himself. The verse I quoted was clearly intended to be taken as literally and seriously as any in the Bible. I leave it to you to explain why the Son of God cannot make a promise without grossly exaggerating his powers, if that is indeed your contention.
Jesus made a promise. An unsolicited promise. All the disciples asked for was an explanation of what happened, not how they could do it themselves. And Jesus gave specific examples, and even demonstrated one, that made it clear that the requirements were not so narrow that NOT ONE of the billions of Christians in the world today can make his promise seem like anything but pure BS.
If a calculus teacher said to come to his office for answers to students’ questions, and he refused to answer even questions about the problems in the text, your analogy would be better. It would be better still if the teacher had promised to answer ANY QUESTION WHATSOEVER, and then refused to answer any question whatsoever.
No worries; I was just joshing. When it comes to what God thinks or wants, anything you think you may have heard, or anything you dream about after eating pizza, is just as authoritative to me as whatever the Pope, speaking ex cathedra, has to say about it.
Seriously.
Good thing I wasn’t trying to convince you that other people were correct. :o
We have a little familiy tradition.
Has been going on for generations.
Every morning we pray:“Dear Lord don’t grant any other prayers, for the rest of the day, for any other believers.”
This prayer seems to be working quite well.
FWIW, in one of his essays on prayer, C. S. Lewis essentially said that this was the thing he found hardest to explain, the point about prayer that gave him the most trouble: how to reconcile the fact that we don’t always get what we pray for (which, by itself, seems totally reasonable) with the apparent explicit promise in Scripture that we would.
I think I’ve figured out how it could work.
Whenever two or more Christians pray for incompatible outcomes, the time-space continuum splits, and parallel universes are created. Each believer gets what he prayed for in his own universe. When the US Open is played with 100 Christian golfers in the field, there are 100 different universes created, with 100 different winners.
I think that makes a lot more sense than the claim I’m getting from some Christians here, namely that although Jesus freely offered to grant any request, if you actually ask for something, you have violated the terms of the agreement.
And why does God bless the absentee?
I confess I can’t understand the almost universal high regard for writers like CS Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, etc. To the extent that they are intellectually honest at all about the contradictions in their faith, they just brush them off with, “It’s a mystery.”
Near the end of his life, Wm F Buckley, who was clearly educated and intelligent, and who frequently devoted entire shows to Muggeridge’s gentle inanities, wrote a book called “Nearer My God,” which was supposed to be the demonstration his oft-repeated claim that Christianity could be proven by reason and logic.
Worst money I ever spent. He gave some extremely unsatisfying reasons why Catholicism was superior to Protestantism, and gave no indication that he was aware of any other alternatives.
It’s just amazing to me how intelligent people can spout such nonsense when it comes to their religion, and depressing to realize how powerful childhood indoctrination can be.
Yes, he did. "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” [Matthew 21:22, NIV] Looks like an if-then statement to me.
William Blake’s poem is not about a beast with seven heads, but rather about a tiger. Nonetheless, if an anonymous internet user were to tell me that Blake intended the poem to be taken literally and nothing figurative was intended, I would ignore that anonymous internet user, or perhaps laugh at him. Even if he insisted that his claim was “clearly” true.
That is not my contention. My contention is that Jesus used the opportunity to remind his disciples of the great magnitude of the gifts that would be offered to them. (Of course by this point He’d already made clear the demanding nature of discipleship.) Those gifts, as presented later in the list of the Fruits of the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5, are what Jesus offers. If you personally would have preferred that Jesus not speak figuratively about the topic, tough luck. There’s no reason for Jesus to craft anything around your persona preferences.
Are you aware that Lewis and Muggeridge were both non-Christians in their youth, thus disproving the claim that their Christianity was a result of “childhood indoctrination”?
If you were raised in a Christian society, you were indoctrinated.
I can’t tell you how many Christians I’ve talked to who claim that they were not Christians when they were children, but came to it as a rational, adult decision as they learned how complex many physical and biological processes are, and simply could not believe that all that was due to “random chance.”
The point is that their rational and logical and mature adult decision was nothing of the kind. They claim that they were not indoctrinated, but they automatically accepted Christianity as the default (if not the only) alternative, when they found atheism inadequate (for a wholly inadequate reason, but that’s another post).
An unindoctrinated person would not simply assume that Christianity was the logical alternative to atheism on the basis of the Argument From Design; he would at most adopt some form of Deism, and not come to Christianity without a fair study of all major religions. But probably less than one person in a thousand does that.
Unless you are a raving racist, who thinks that Arabs or Chinese or Indians are too stupid to see the truth, indoctrination is the only way to explain why various regions of the world are 90+% Islam or Hindu or Christian.