Maybe someone has no inclination to pray – that is a curious thing. It means you have no idea of your spiritual plight. You don’t realise your guilt, the shortness of your life; you are ignorant of the nature of sin. You have no ounce of understanding of the human condition, of why people are as they are. Men and women are given this knowledge of right and wrong, and yet are so unable to keep the standards. You have no grasp of eternity, of what is ahead for you. You don’t understand that man is fallen and with the fall came condemnation.
The promises are no good for someone who is deluded. If you think you are an insider already, you are hardly likely to go and knock. Knocking is very decided thing to do; it illustrates trust. Christ is the door. When you bang the knocker on a big door, you need a certain amount of confidence. You rap on the door. You say, I know that door will swing open because the one inside has promised to open. Why does God put a door before us which is closed at first? Because he wants us to exercise faith. To trust is to go and believe he will be true. If I come and I am sincere he is bound to hear. The fact that he is faithful means he is bound to keep his promise. Maybe I will not be heard. Maybe the power of his death ran out. Absurd! He is God, he paid the price for all sins. But perhaps he does not know about my slander, what I am. He knows all about you, but if you ask for new life, you will not be turned away. If you have no trust, he cannot bless you. Grace is like a fountain, which is tapped into by faith. Faith consists of three parts: firstly knowledge, understanding; secondly belief, assent to the truth; thirdly trust. The knocking is the trusting part. My prayer will be answered if I am sincere.
If that is how Almighty God is to us, then we must be to each other. We must not be difficult and cannot be asked. We must be like the Lord.
What prevents our prayers being heard?
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1. All prayer is useless which does not include sincere repentance. ‘All ye that labour‘, says Christ – labour with the burden of sin and guilt. You will not be heard if you can trip into the presence of God, with no consciousness of sin. Have you prayed? What did you pray for? Healing, help, blessing? Yes, he may just answer to encourage you, but you will never come to God like this. We need to acknowledge we are full of horrible pride and deceit, greed, lust, malice, temper.
2. Don’t come praying selfish prayers. Some do – they don’t really want to know him. They want things here to go right for them; after that they will think about seeking him. Esau prayed an opportunistic prayer. ‘Is there not a blessing for me?’ but he wanted some good thing for himself in this life.
3. We mustn’t pray unbelieving prayers: ‘Oh Lord, forgive me my sin’, but I don’t believe it will ever really happen – a longshot prayer. Say in your heart, he has commanded me to come, invited me, pleaded with me.
4. A hypocritical prayer will not be heard. Some people are all words, or all emotion. Tears well up in their eyes and they say to God, ‘Convert me’, but next week they are absent from the Lord’s house, so the church has to send people out to bring them back. There is no shame in that; we all come kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God, but some step forward with emotions and not with the will.
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