This look, this confidence in knowing you are loved is what God wants for you and for me.
I'm reading a book by Andrew Murray called Teach Me To Pray. I want to share some of what I read today. It's from Chapters 5 and 6.
Murray writes, "it is the will of God. . . that every childlike believing petition is granted.
"If no answer comes, we are not to sit down in resignation and suppose that it is not God's will to give an answer. Something in the prayer must not be as God would have it: childlike and believing. It is far easier for the flesh to submit without the answer then to yield itself to be searched and purified by the Spirit until it has learned to pray the prayer of faith.
"One of the marks of the weakened state of the Christian life these days is that there are so many who rest content without specific answers to prayer. They pray daily, they ask many things, and trust that some of them will be heard, but know little of direct, definite answers to prayer as the rule of daily life. But this is what the Father wills.
"Sometimes the answer is a refusal because the request is not according to God's word . . . Our Father lets His child know when He will not give him what he asks.
"Live as a child of God, and you may pray as a child with complete certainty of an answer . . . father-like giving is the divine response to childlike living.
"Lord, show us that only our unchildlike distance from the Father hinders the answer to our prayer, and lead us on to the true life of God's children."
"Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him!" Matthew 7:9-11