This idea from Charles Spurgeon. I was reading one of his sermons called “Prayer Certain of Success” where he points out that points out that each of these commands—ask, seek, knock—refer to an ascending scale of intensity. I had never seen that before, but I think it’s right. Jesus always made his words count—he isn’t just using different words to say the same thing. And this matters because often we simply stop at asking when we need to go further, because if we don’t, it can cause us to wonder if our prayers make any difference at all.