But if His will is to give it us, why ask Him at all?  Why pray at all, if God already knows our necessities, and is able and willing to supply them?

My friends, the longer I live, the more certain I am that the only reason for praying at all is because God is our Father; the more certain I am that we shall never have any heart to pray unless we believe that God is our Father.  If we forget that, we may utter to Him selfish cries for bread; or when we look at His great power, we may become terrified, and utter selfish cries to Him not to harm us, without any real shame or sorrow for sin:  but few of us will have any heart to persevere in those cries.  People will say to themselves, ’If God is evil, He will not care to have mercy on me:  and if He is good, there is no use wearying Him by asking Him what He has already intended to give me:  why should I pray at all?’

The only answer is, ’Pray, because God is your Father, and you His child.’  The only answer; but the most complete answer.  I will engage to say, that if anyone here is ever troubled with doubts about prayer, those two simple words, ‘Our Father,’ if he can once really believe them in their full richness and depth, will make the doubts vanish in a moment, and prayer seem the most natural and reasonable of all acts.  It is because we are God’s children, not merely His creatures, that He will have us pray.  Because He is educating us to know Him; to know Him not merely to be an Almighty Power, but a living, loving Person; not merely an irresistible Fate, but a Father who delights in the love of His children, who wishes to shape them into His own likeness, and make them fellow-workers with Him; therefore it is that He will have us pray.  Doubtless he could have given us everything without our asking; for He does already give us almost everything without our asking.  But He wishes to educate us as His children; to make us trust in Him; to make us love Him; to make us work for Him of our own free wills, in the great battle which He is carrying on against evil; and that He can only do by teaching us to pray to Him.  I say it reverently, but firmly.  As far as we can see, God cannot educate us to know Him, The living, willing, loving Father, unless He teaches us to open our hearts to Him, and to ask Him freely for what we want, just because He knows what we want already.

If I have not made this plain enough to any of you, my friends, let me go back to the simple, practical explanation of it which God Himself has given us in those two words—­father and child.

Should you like to have a child who never spoke to you, never asked you for anything?  Of course not.  And why?  ‘Because,’ you would say, ’one might as well have a dumb animal in one’s family instead of a child, if it is never to talk and ask questions and advice.’  Most true and reasonable, my friends.  And as you would say concerning your children, so says God