How many sincere children of God struggle to accept God’s quintessential goodness towards them harbouring lingering doubts deep within their souls?

Towards the end of His sermon on the mount in Matthew chapter 7, The Lord seems to be at pains to put this matter to rest once and for all. He seems to want to wipe away and delete this mistaken view of the nature of God people seemed to hold and harbour deep within them thus holding them back from engaging with God as a good good Father.

For Christ of course who came to reveal the true nature of the Father, this was paramount – that people grasp the Father’s true heart. For He alone held the ultimate credentials and stood fully qualified to do exactly that (John 1:18).

Wanting to put to rest once and for all this matter of God’s kindness and good-naturedness, The Lord Jesus coaxes and cajoles His listeners to come forward to seek and ask from the Father, confident in His unblemished kindness and perfectly good nature.

Matthew 7:11
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!

According to Christ, God is a kind-hearted Father whose kindness and generosity we should not even question seeing that we, evil as we are, deliver good gifts to our children upon their request. How much more God!

It is this kind and benevolent nature of God that we can most certainly bank on to confidently and at all times bring our requests to Him. It is this nature of God that the Lord says should incentivise and encourage us to confidently come to Him with our needs. If we, evil as we are, can and do give kind gifts to our children and would not have it in us to be intentionally evil towards our own, how much more God in whom there is no darkness or shadow of turning?

1 John 1:5
This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.

That is what God is – Light, in whom there is NO darkness. We can bank on this God in whom there is not even a shred of darkness, an iota of evil. God is good through and through and unfailingly so.

James 1:17
Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.

God is the epitome of goodness, the Father of heavenly lights and, equally important, immutable, unchanging, unshifting – a constant we can trust in. It is His”light” and unchanging nature that causes and qualifies Him perfectly to be the giver of every good and perfect gift. It is precisely because God is Light and in Him there is no darkness at all or shifting of any kind that all good gifts are from Him. Not only is God perfectly good but He is constantly so.

So, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7) – your heavenly Father’s heart is kind and giving, His nature unchanging; for this reason you stand assured of His kind response to your seeking in childlike trust.