NOTES for Jo1 5:14-15
John's words about receiving from God through Jesus Christ what we ask for may seem overly optimistic. Indeed, almost every Christian has experienced unanswered requests with which he or she turned to God, turned to Christ, receiving no answer at all or receiving an answer other than the one expected and hoped for. Yet such experience says less about God's responsiveness or the Savior's attitude toward us than about our own spiritual condition. Words about faith may sound commonplace in this context, but that does not make them any less profoundly true.
What is meant, of course, is faith as trust in God, not as a system of views and convictions of which a person is certain. The question of trust is the central one here. Trust does not merely open the door to communion with God; to a certain extent, it changes the reality in which a person lives and to which that person is connected. Indeed, today even scientists are increasingly convinced that any reality is real only insofar as it is observed and therefore has an observer. The universe can exist only if there is also an absolute Observer.
This postulate would be merely another version of the cosmological argument for God's existence if it did not also apply to human beings, and indeed to every spiritual being that possesses self-awareness and is a bearer of free will. Every such being, and therefore every person, creates a reality of his or her own, which is real precisely to the extent that his or her spiritual life, and life as a whole, approaches fullness. God alone possesses the absolute fullness of being and life, and human life is full insofar as it is joined to God's life.
This is where faith as trust plays the key role: it joins two wills, God's and the human will, creating a single divine-human space of being and life, and therefore a single divine-human reality. It is within this divine-human reality that what the apostle writes about exists: here God's will and the human will coincide, God and the human person jointly create what happens within it, and human requests are fulfilled without fail, precisely to the extent that they coincide without reservation with God's plan for human life.