Our Heavenly Father Knows Best
2004 : Week 21  |  Website Version  

We ask God for things all the time: a job, faith, perseverance, health and direction in life. Often we pray on behalf of others: for friends who are ill, for those in ministry or those going through difficult times. We pray, but do we believe the Lord will hear our prayers? If we believe God hears our prayers, do we also believe He will answer them in a manner that will bless us?

In today’s passage, Jesus teaches us that our prayers are heard by God the Father, and He will always do what is good for us. Jesus uses the relationship between a father and child to teach us this. As Jesus explains to His crowd,

	9 "Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? 10 "Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he?
	Matthew 7:9-10 (NASB)

The point Jesus is making is that when a child asks his human father for something, the father hears the request. If the request is something that is good for the child, the father will meet the need.

Similarly, Jesus tells us that our Father in heaven hears us when we pray, and God answers our prayers by providing what is best for us. God is so much more then our fathers can ever be. We are alive, every one of us, because He sustains us.

Jesus began by using a comparison to show us how our heavenly Father loves us; He compared God’s love to our human father’s love. Now however, Jesus contrasts the difference between our fathers and God, to further show how much God loves us. Jesus reminds us that our human fathers are sinful. True, they love us as best as they are able to, but they cannot love us perfectly, since they are not perfect. Our parents are fallen people in a fallen world. They love and provide for us imperfectly, but God’s love for us is different. God is perfect; His love for us is perfect, and He meets our needs perfectly. We are confident our fathers will give us good things when we ask them; we should be even more confident when we ask God to meet our needs.

That does not mean that our prayers are answered in the manner we hoped they would be, and it does not mean that everything we want will be provided to us. God knows the difference between our needs and our wants. When we ask God for something, we ask based on a limited view of our circumstances. When God answers our prayers, He answers them with an infinite view of our circumstances and every other circumstance in the universe. As a result, when we pray, we must be confident that God’s answer to our prayer will be what is best for us, since He sees and knows all. At some point in our Christian walk, we have to put all our faith in the Lord. That means we trust Him with everything: with our souls, to meet our needs, to refine us and sustain us. We must learn to approach God with confidence; Jesus teaches us several things in the verse above that should help us to do so:

1) God hears all our prayers
2) God’s perfect love is better then the love of our imperfect parents
3) God will answer our prayers by doing what is best for us.