You are loved with an everlasting love, and as the song which we've just heard sung

so beautifully states, there have been times when we've stepped out of God's will.

There's never a time when we can step out of his care underneath our everlasting arms.

But I suppose that there are a few people here tonight who have really sort of given

up the idea that God listens to your prayers.

Maybe you still pray in a sort of half-hearted and maybe desperate way, but you don't see

the answers, and you wonder whether God's listening, whether it's really worth it, nothing

is happening the way you expect it to or the way you've been asking God to make it happen,

and maybe you're discouraged about the whole thing of prayer.

Well, there's a great problem that God has with you and me, and I think probably with

all of us at some time or other in greater or lesser degree, and that is that God, because

He loves us with an everlasting love, will not give us less than the best.

He doesn't want to give us less than the best.

And the problem is that we don't want the best.

We have our own ideas about happiness, joy, and success, and fulfillment, and a lot of

those ideas we've gotten straight from the world, and you know it, and the world is giving

us a lot of garbage and builds and boulder dash and nonsense, and we have to constantly hold

up the notions that the world is giving us to this straight edge, this book, and we can't

tell how crooked our thinking is until we compare it with the Scriptures.

And in Matthew the seventh chapter, verses 9 to 11, and I opened my Bible and it came

to Luke, and I was wondering why I couldn't find the verses, Matthew.

We read this, is there a man among you who will offer his son a stone when he asks for

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