In this way our Lord teaches us that with infinite fatherliness and faithfulness is how God meets us in secret, so our part should be the childlike simplicity of faith with the confidence that our prayer will bring a blessing.

The blessing of the closet does not depend on the strong or the fervent feeling with which I pray, but upon the love and the power of the Father to whom I entrust my needs.

As a child has to prove a sum to be correct, so the proof that we have prayed correctly is the answer. If we ask and don't receive, it is because we have not learned to pray correctly. Let every learner in the school of Christ therefore take the Master's Word in all simplicity: Every one that asks receives.

...it is father-like love that awakens childlike trust.

We don't have to learn to be holy as a hard lesson at school in order to make God think well of us; we are to learn it at home with the Father to help us. God loves you not because you are clever and not because you are good but because He is your Father. The cross of Christ does not make God love us; it is the outcome and measure of His love for us.

His love is the basis of everything, and we must get on that as the solid foundation of our religious life and not grow up into that but grow up out of it.

The master judges by the result, but our Father judges by the effort.

There is a twofold use of prayer: the one is to obtain strength and blessing for our own life; the other is intercession - the higher, true glory of prayer for which Christ has taken us into His fellowship and teaching. This is where prayer is the royal power of a child of God who exercises in heaven on behalf of others and even of the kingdom.

That a child obtains what he asks from his father looks so perfectly natural, we almost count it the father's duty to give. But with a friend, it is as if the kindness is more free, dependent not on nature but on sympathy and character....But then we must be living as His friends. I am still a child even when a wanderer, but friendship depends upon the conduct.