I once heard Billy Graham tell a story I haven’t been able to forget.

A young man was about to graduate from college. For months he had been eyeing a beautiful sports car at a nearby dealership. He knew his father could afford it so he told him, “That’s all I want for graduation. Nothing else.”

Graduation morning came. His father called him into his study, looked him in the eye, and told him how proud he was and how much he loved him. Then he handed him a beautifully wrapped gift box.

His son opened it and found it was a leather-bound Bible with his name embossed in gold on the cover.

He was furious.

He looked at his father and said, “With all your money, this is what you give me?” He set the Bible down on the desk and walked out of the house.

Years passed. The son built a career and started a family. His life was settled. But he and his father never fully repaired what broke that morning. Then one day came a phone call. His father was gone.

After returning home for the funeral, the son decided to look through his father’s study. He found the Bible his father had gifted him many years earlier. It was still sitting where he had left it. Still wrapped and never opened. He picked it up and, with a strange mix of curiosity and sadness, he opened it. His father had underlined a verse: Matthew 7:11, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him.”

As he turned the page, something fell out. A cashier’s check, dated the day of his graduation, made out to the car dealership for the full amount of the car he requested.

Shocked, he realized his father had already paid for the car. This whole time, the gift he asked for had been waiting inside the gift he didn’t. He just never opened it.

Paul closes his great prayer in Ephesians 3 with a doxology that expresses what this story shows us: God “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20).

The Father’s gifts, though they seem unimpressive at first, are always better than our request. In Christ he offers us a new life, a new family, a new Father, a new Spirit, a new Lord. In the gospel, God gives a gift of greater joy from a greater love than we would have thought to request. But we, like the resentful son in our story, so often set it down and walk away because the package didn’t look like what we had in mind.

God’s offer is not an insult or a miss, but an answer beyond what we knew to pray for.

Will you open it now?