Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Matthew 6:8

As a parent, you instinctively know what your children need, often times before they ask you. Do you give them what they need even if they haven’t asked and when they do ask, are you not happy to meet their needs because you love them immensely?

Suppose your child asks for something which you know is not the best choice for them. Would you give them what they asked for knowing it is not good for them or do you respond with compassion and unconditional love with saying, “No, not now.”

I believe we often overlook the similarities in the way we parent our children and the way that God is parenting us. God is, after all, our heavenly Father, conveying the authority, warmth, and intimacy of a loving father’s care. A father that knows what we need before we ask him. Compare how your children respond to you when they don’t get their way and how you respond to God when life is hard. I suppose we should give our children more grace when they are not content as God is being gracious to us as we learn to trust him with our needs.

In the gospel of Matthew 6, Jesus is instructing his disciples how to pray, telling them that the heavenly Father knows what they need before they pray. I’m called to trust that God sees what I see. In fact, he sees beyond what I see. Paul Miller writes in A Praying Life, “God sees the whole story and is completely trustworthy to be at work on a grand scale, in the minutia, and even in my own life.”

God knows what you need before you ask him.

40 Gifts of Lent | When God Meets Our Deepest Needs: Gift 3 | A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World, Paul Miller