You may have heard it said, “God gives us what we need, not what we want.” It is sometimes applied to life in general, and it is often applied to prayer. This religious platitude is in direct contradiction to the word of God. It stands especially against the teachings of Jesus on prayer. It is an excuse for unbelief. It is a self-pardon for failure. Whatever you end up having, you can tell yourself that it is what you need. If you comfort yourself this way, you will never have to admit your shortcoming. You will never have to admit that you are not the spiritual giant you think you are after all. You will never have to say, “God did not answer my prayer because of my unbelief. But I will not make excuses, and I will not give up. I will repent of my lack of faith, and I will revisit the word of God and grow in faith. Then I will come back and receive what I want from God.”

The idea of need is absurd by itself. You can always need less. In fact, need is impossible to define on its own. You never absolutely need anything that you ask for in prayer. You want a steak, but you think you only need bread, so you ask for bread. If you have bread, you do not need butter. But if the purpose is to survive, you can eat tree roots. You can eat trash. You can eat animal excrements. So you do not need bread after all. Do you need to survive in the first place? If you are a Christian, then even if you starve to death, God will accept you into heaven. So pull your head back out of the dog toilet and just die. But who says you need to go to heaven? Why not burn in hell? There is nothing contradictory or unintelligible about it. Millions of people burn in hell. But you see, you do not want to burn in hell. You want to go to heaven, and that is why you need Jesus Christ. Well, I do not want to eat trash either, and I do not want to eat only bread. Therefore, I need the steak.

Need is relative. Need has no meaning without a definite point of reference. No one really needs anything — unless it is to get what they want. When people define need, they define it by what they want. If they need little, it is because they want little, or because they only dare to want little. This desire is often unspoken, but it is easily discovered once we talk about it, because inevitably the need is to satisfy what they want to achieve. Perhaps their desire has a range, and need is defined by the minimum that satisfies what they desire, but the need is still defined by the desire. When we force a dichotomy between need and want, need loses its meaning. Need is relative to something, some desired outcome or desired standard. Need cannot stand by itself. Since need cannot stand by itself, it is meaningless to say that God gives us what we need and not what we want, because this would just mean that he gives the minimum of what is desired. This limitation becomes meaningless if we increase the desire so that the minimum also becomes greater.