What are we shown here that we need to ask for? Before we consider it, we must remind ourselves that the Bible teaches a number of things about prayer which are foundational. The Bible does teach that God does not hear our prayers when we harbour any wickedness, or selfish schemes in our hearts. The Bible is very clear about that. It describes any such thing as an insult to God. It's almost like short-changing somebody in a shop. If I go to God and I come as if to pray and to ask him for something, but all the time my heart is far from him – I've got my own ideas how I'm going to live; I've got various personal and wicked schemes in mind, habits and things – then God will not hear me. I am not taking him seriously. If I approach him as though I do not believe that his eyes can see right into my mind and right into my heart, and that all things are naked to him and he knows exactly what I'm thinking, then I insult him. I am praying to a God who I don't take seriously. I don't believe he can see what I'm up to, what I intend. If we do that we mustn't expect God to hear.
Then also the Bible tells us that God doesn't listen to hypocrites: people who are very pleased with themselves, people, who while not living for God, imagine that they are such wonderful people. They imagine God must be pleased with them and the Bible makes it clear that there is such a thing as praying with yourself. God isn't listening because we are too self-satisfied, too pleased with ourselves. We don't feel any great need for forgiveness or transformation of life. God won't listen if that's our idea.
The Bible says too that God doesn't hear the proud and the rich. That does not necessarily include the person never necessarily aimed at being rich. It means people who are rich in the sense that they are seeking for and satisfied by this world's things. If people are rich, all their minds and hearts and satisfactions are to be found in worldly things, and if people are proud, then God resists them.
And then God resists the rebel. If I am rebellious in my heart, I shall not have my prayers answered. In fact, the Bible says that there comes a time when a rebellious person has a great calamity or trouble or trial, and although he may be a complete rebel against God, suddenly he is in trouble and he cries out to God for help. The Bible says that in those circumstances God shall laugh at the rebel in the day of his calamity. Not laugh at him in an unseemly way, but the words chosen are meant to show us that in the day of our calamity God will take us no more seriously than we take him.
Of course, also the Bible tells us that God won't hear the person who prays in a superstitious manner – the prayer wheels and the rosaries and all the rest of it, and the vain repetitions, all the superstition. No, you cannot pray like that. God is a personal God. We have a God of infinite intelligence, whose ear is ever open to the slightest whisper of the heart from any sincere soul. We don't have a God who has to be persuaded to hear us with things that smell and give forth various aromas, with various enactments and fancy rituals. We don't have a God who needs, in a petty way, to be pleased by superstitious things. No, we have the great God on high who reads every heart and will listen to every earnest prayer.