NOTES for Jo1 5:14-15
John's words about receiving from God through Jesus Christ what is asked can seem overly optimistic. Indeed, almost every Christian surely has the experience of unfulfilled requests with which he turned to God, turned to Christ, receiving no answer at all or receiving not the answer he expected and hoped for. Meanwhile, such experience characterizes not so much God's responsiveness or the Savior's attitude toward us as our own spiritual state. Words about faith sound textbook in such a context, but they do not cease for that reason to be deeply true.
The issue is, of course, faith as trust in God, not as a system of views and convictions in which a person is confident. The question of trust turns out to be the main one here. Trust not only opens for a person the door of communion with God; to a certain degree it changes the reality in which a person lives and to which he is related. Indeed, today even scientists are increasingly convinced that any reality is real only insofar as it is observed and therefore has its observer. The universe can exist only if an absolute Observer also exists.
This postulate would be merely one more version of the cosmological proof of God's existence if it did not also apply to humanity and to every spiritual being in general that possesses self-awareness and is the bearer of free will. Every such being, and therefore every person, creates his own reality, which is real exactly insofar as his own spiritual life, and life in general, is close to fullness. Only God possesses absolute fullness of being and life, and a person's life is full insofar as it is connected with God's life.
Here faith-trust plays the key role: it joins two wills, God's and human, creating a single divine-human space of being and life, and therefore a single divine-human reality. In this divine-human reality exists what the apostle writes about: here God's will and human will coincide; God and the person jointly create what happens in it, and the person's requests are fulfilled unconditionally, as unconditionally as they coincide with God's plan for human life.